A/HRC/45/13 compulsory quarantine centres, and that care should be taken to ensure that the bodies of the deceased are properly registered, that families are able to identify them and that the remains are dealt with in line with their own tradition, religion or culture. Additionally, families of the disappeared, who may be in a particularly precarious position, should be supported. 95. The Working Group continued to receive reports regarding countries where the security and political situations have favoured the occurrence of enforced disappearances. In these contexts, families of disappeared persons and organizations supporting them too often have not been able to lodge complaints or to have access to proper remedies, including effective independent investigations of such disappearances. Worse are the continued reports of reprisals faced by families of victims and the human rights defenders and organizations supporting them. 96. The Working Group also continued to receive information about the adoption of regressive legislation and measures in the area of truth, justice and reparations, which do not allow for individuals, families and entire societies to access their rights to truth. These obstacles to truth and justice have also favoured widespread impunity for grave human rights violations such as enforced disappearances. 97. The Working Group also observes that enforced disappearances have occurred in transnational contexts with pervasive impunity. Under the guise of combating terrorism, some States have deepened security cooperation with the aim of facilitating forced returns of targeted individuals, which has often placed them outside the protection of the law. The Working Group maintains that a failure by State agents to acknowledge deprivation of liberty and a refusal to acknowledge detention constitute an enforced disappearance, even if it is of a short duration. Procedural safeguards upon arrest and during the first hours of deprivation of liberty remain essential in order to prevent possible violations. These safeguards include immediate registration, judicial oversight of the detention, notification of family members as soon as an individual is deprived of liberty, the hiring of a defence lawyer of one’s choice, and lawyer-client privilege. 98. Furthermore, States are reminded of the obligation to carry out comprehensive individual assessments to determine whether these individuals may face risks to their rights upon return to their countries of origin and what those risks may be. Institutional oversight mechanisms should guarantee that this happens in an independent, impartial and fair manner. With a view to tackling impunity, States are obliged to conduct independent and effective investigations into possible violations and to provide victims and their families the right to an effective remedy, which should at a minimum guarantee cessation of violations, restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-recurrence. 99. As the Working Group marks 40 years of existence in 2020, it calls upon the international community to remobilize around the fight against enforced disappearances and to show commitment to ending this practice. It also reiterates its call to all States to ratify, without delay, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and to accept the competence of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances to receive individual cases under article 31, and inter-State complaints under article 32, of the Convention. 25