A/HRC/42/40/Add.2 missing persons and provides legal regulations with respect to the determination of, and accounting and search for missing persons, and the rights of victims and their relatives, and corresponding State obligations. This is an important step towards the creation of a legal framework to address enforced disappearances and to guarantee the rights of victims. These efforts should however be continued, given that the law is incomplete and conceptually inconsistent; the fact that certain provisions are not in full conformity with international law raises questions with regard to the scope of application and modes of implementation of its various provisions. 25. In particular, it is difficult to determine which norms of the law are applicable to all missing persons and which ones concern those who went missing in “special circumstances”. During its visit, the Working Group was given an indication that the intention of the law was to define legal status and to ensure certain rights of those who went missing during the conflict in the eastern part of the country and of their relatives. The adopted law provides for more extensive scope of its application, stipulating – in line with its title, which suggests the inclusion of all missing within it – that it covers “legal relations connected with obtaining of the legal status of missing persons in situations of an armed conflict, due to hostilities, domestic insurgency, emergency situations of natural or man-made disasters, other events that can cause mass death of people, as well as of the persons missing as a result of any other circumstances” (art. 3). The open-ended list of the situations covered in which persons may go missing suggests that the law is applicable to all disappearances, enforced disappearances as defined in international law. 26. The law however excludes the phrase “any other circumstances” in many of its articles, in particular in the section regulating the creation and functioning of the Commission on Persons Missing due to Special Circumstances – an inter-institutional task force authorized to, inter alia, coordinate accounting and searches for missing persons, and to maintain the Unified Register of Persons Missing due to Special Circumstances.4 To illustrate the point, it seems that only information about those missing during anti-terrorist or military operations, notably in the context of the conflict in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, will be entered into the Unified Register, while information about enforced disappearances occurring not in “special circumstances” will not, and the Commission will not deal with such cases. Rather, such information will be managed by the national police. From the humanitarian and human rights perspective, this exclusion is hardly acceptable; the law itself recognizes this by prohibiting, in its article 7, any discrimination between missing persons and their relatives based on, inter alia, the territory of disappearance or other criteria. 27. The Working Group encourages the Commission to be proactive in finding ways to address a number of questions relating to the application of the law, either in its internal regulation due to be developed by the Commission and approved by the Government as the first task upon its formation, or by initiating legislative amendments and other pieces of legislation or through victim-oriented interpretations of the law. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which in accordance with article 2 (2) of the law has priority over it in cases of conflict, and the Declaration should also be employed to clarify and align its provisions with applicable international legal standards. Further comments on the new law will be included in the corresponding sections of the report. 28. The Working Group welcomes the introduction of new article 146 (1) to the Criminal Code of Ukraine following the adoption of the Law “On the Legal Status of Missing Persons” 4 The Commission on Persons Missing due to Special Circumstances, formally established on 10 April 2019 by the Order of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine no. 248-p. The Commission comprises 16 members representing the national police, the Office of the Prosecutor General, the State Service on Emergency Situations, the Ministry of Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons of Ukraine, the Anti-Terrorist Centre of the Security Service of Ukraine, the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Civil Military Cooperation, the Secretariat of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, the Office of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, the National Military History Museum of Ukraine and the National Red Cross Society. Notably, families of missing persons, their associations and non-governmental human rights organizations will not be represented. 7