The Hague, 3 July 2024: Professor Sylvia Chika Ifemeje, the Attorney General of Anambra State in Nigeria, and Ms. Nkoli Anyaoku, an Adviser to the Anambra State Government, ANSG, have completed a two-day working visit to the Headquarters of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in The Hague.
The Government of Anambra State led by Governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, established the Bureau in April 2023, following the recommendation of a Truth, Justice, and Peace Commission into violence, agitation, and restiveness in south-east Nigeria. The Bureau has been tasked with accounting for missing persons and providing data that can help police in Anambra State investigate such cases.
During their visit to ICMP Headquarters, the two representatives from Nigeria were briefed on legislative and institutional initiatives that ICMP has undertaken in a variety of countries to help authorities establish sustainable and effective long-term missing persons processes. They visited ICMP’s human identification laboratories and received presentations on how data is collected and compared using ICMP’s Integrated Data Management System (iDMS). One of the major challenges facing Nigeria is the absence of reliable data on missing persons.
Professor Ifemeje and Ms Anyaoku discussed the role of civil society in addressing the issue of missing persons. Throughout the world, ICMP has been able to demonstrate that efforts to account for large numbers of missing persons as a result of systematic violence or disaster are successful when families of the missing are involved in the process and are able to access their rights to truth and justice.
About ICMP
ICMP is a treaty-based intergovernmental organization with Headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands. Its mandate is to secure the co-operation of governments and other authorities in locating persons missing as a result of conflicts, human rights abuses, disasters, organized violence and other causes and to assist them in doing so.