Forced Disappearance Quotes

From nine years old, I lived with fear. I saw our neighbours disappearing. I was scared that I would come home from school and my parents would not be there.

The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who 'disappeared'. That's what the candle is for.

Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or 'disappearance' to be carried out by their officials with impunity.

Most victims of rendition were arrested and detained illegally in the first place: some were abducted; others were denied access to any legal process, including the ability to challenge the decision to transfer them because of the risk of torture. There is also a close link between renditions and enforced disappearances. Many of those who have been illegally detained in one country and illegally transported to another have subsequently “disappeared”, including dozens who have “disappeared” in US custody. Every one of the victims of rendition interviewed by Amnesty International has described incidents of torture and other ill-treatment

In 2006, I published my first novel, 'In the Country of Men.' The publication of the book gave me a bigger platform to speak about my father's abduction and Libya's human-rights record.

We'll abduct Garian. Or Jason." "And—?" "And dump them into the ocean. Nobody would ever pay a ransom for them.

My father, the political dissident Jaballa Matar, disappeared from his home in Cairo in March 1990.

The most horrible thing is not a government that stages public executions, but a government that secretly disposes of its victims.

If the police believed that they were planning any form of resistance against the state, then you were just gone. Nobody knew where you were, and you just hoped to see that family member again.

I think that even the Mexican society is a victim of all of this, of these crimes of "cleaning" people, of discarding people.

In 1984, showing extraordinary courage, a group of Guatemalan wives, mothers and other relatives of disappeared people banded together to form the Mutual Support Group for the Appearance Alive of Our Relatives.

Genocide involves the attempt to achieve the disappearance of a group by whatever means. It does not have to be violent, it could be a combination of policies that would lead to a certain group dying out.

Thousands of people come to LA every year, and some of them just disappear. Somebody gets them. In the States around 100,000 people vanish each year. I don't know what that means. Maybe there's something that just pulls 'em out.

The police didn't afford you a phone call. You just disappeared for a while. And what was scary was we lived in a state where some people disappeared forever.

If you want prisoners to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.

It wasn't necessarily my choice to disappear.