A/HRC/19/58 This right is central to the conception of human rights, as it expresses the right and the capacity of each human being to be the holder of rights and obligations under the law. It has often been described as the ―right to have rights‖ and as a direct consequence of the right to respect for human dignity. 1 The Working Group has always considered that enforced disappearances infringe the right to be recognized as a person before the law (see the first report of the Working Group, E/CN.4/1435, § 184). Following this conclusion, the Declaration for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance provides, in its article 1.2: Any act of enforced disappearance places the persons subjected thereto outside the protection of the law […] It constitutes a violation of the rules of international law guaranteeing, inter alia, the right to recognition as a person before the law […] There is indeed a strong link between one of the elements of the legal definition of enforced disappearance – the placement of the disappeared person outside the protection of the law – and the right to recognition as a person before the law. Following recent developments of case law at the universal and regional levels2, the Working Group deems it necessary to state its interpretation of article 1.2, in order to help States to apply the Declaration in a way that is most conducive to the protection of all persons from enforced disappearance. Consequently, the Working Group has decided to issue the following general comment: General Comment 1. Enforced disappearance represents a paradigmatic violation of the right to be recognized as a person before the law. One of the constitutive elements of enforced disappearances is that the person is placed ―outside the protection of the law‖. This means that not only the detention is denied, and/or the fate or the whereabouts of the person are concealed, but that while deprived of his/her liberty, this person is denied any right under the law, and is placed in a legal limbo, in a situation of total defencelessness. 2. Enforced disappearances entail the denial of the disappeared person’s legal existence and, as a consequence, prevent him or her from enjoying all other human rights and freedoms. The disappeared person may keep his or her name, at least when the birth has been registered (and except in cases when the true identity of children, who have been taken away from their parents, is falsified, concealed or destroyed), but he/she is not shown in the record of detainees; neither is the name kept in the registers of deaths. The disappeared is de facto deprived of his or her domicile. His/her properties become frozen in a legal limbo since no one, not even the next-of-kin, may dispose of that patrimony until the disappeared appears alive or is declared dead, that is a ―non-person‖. 3. The right to be recognized as a person before the law is also implicated in the case of children who were born during their mothers’ enforced disappearance, and who were thereafter illegally adopted. As far as their biological identity is no protected, their very own personality is not recognized before the law. Thus, article 20 of the Declaration provides that such acts of abduction, as well as the act of altering or suppressing documents attesting to their true identity, ―shall constitute an extremely serious offence, which shall be 1 2 14 See in particular article 5 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, where those two rights are associated. See in particular, Human Rights Committee, views Zohra Madoui v. Algeria, 28 October 2008, § 7.7, 7.8; Inter-American Court of Human Rights decision, Anzualdo Castro v. Peru, 22 September 2009, par. 90 and 101.