‘Pushbacks’ as enforced disappearances

In late September 2023, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances formally adopted its first General Comment on the application of the Convention on Enforced Disappearances in the context of migration. The General Comment is based on decades of migrant-led struggles, particularly throughout the Americas, in resistance of mass killings and disappearances of migrants, even after death, by bordering regimes and racialising state violence. Such policies of deliberate endangerment, abandonment, and unprotection in borderlands are extreme forms of racialised group-based repression, persecution, and social erasure through summary expulsions (‘pushbacks’) which entail the person’s removal from recognition and protection of the law.

We have documented cases of both direct and indirect enforced disappearances, and sought to advance the application of this legal and political category to the systemic practices of border violence through different politico-legal interventions. A central and pending intervention formative to this issue-area is the individual complaint against Greece brought before the UN Human Rights Committee by Fady, a Syrian refugee in the EU, whom we have been accompanying with others since 2018. F.A.A. v Greece is the first complaint against Greece before the Committee arguing that ‘pushbacks’ may constitute acts of enforced disappearance and demanding systemic redress for broader systemic ‘pushback’ policies.