A/HRC/39/46 54. With this in mind, the Working Group decided to address the issue of standards and public policies for an effective investigation of enforced disappearances. In the present report, the Working Group outlines the main elements around this issue, with the aim of studying them further over the course of the next reporting cycle. The Working Group will hold an expert consultation and is open to receive inputs on the issue from States, families of the disappeared, civil society, United Nations mechanisms or agencies and other interested stakeholders. 2. Existing standards 55. The study will compile, in accordance with international human rights law, in particular the Declaration and the Convention, which rights and State obligations arise from the duty to investigate. Many of these rights and obligations stem from the three international human rights instruments on enforced disappearances, 25 while others derive from provisions contained in other human rights treaties, 26 customary law, soft law or national or international court decisions. 56. The obligation to investigate with due diligence was originally included in the first judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the Velásquez Rodríguez case27 and later developed in multiple court judgments. The first set of Court judgments dealt with the complete lack of national investigations in many Latin American countries, which had faced dictatorships from the 1960s to the 1980s. Habeas corpus proceedings were usually futile, judiciaries commonly lacked impartiality and the systems for criminal investigation and prosecution were not prepared to deal with crimes committed or sponsored by States. 57. This is why international human rights mechanisms, triggered by the litigation initiated by the families of the disappeared, had to decide on cases of enforced disappearances that had begun a long time before. Many local cases were closed as a result of statutes of limitations; many others were dropped with the justification that, in the absence of a body, there was no criminal responsibility; but most of the investigations were halted in the context of amnesty laws or were ineffectively carried out by military jurisdictions. In addition to total impunity, searches were not carried out for the victims, as they were only conceived as being necessary as part of a criminal investigation. Such circumstances also occurred in other regions in which enforced disappearances were and are still being committed, as the Working Group has been documenting since 1980. 58. The reaction from international human rights bodies was the development of jurisprudence based on existing human rights treaties and specific instruments focusing on enforced disappearances, notably the Declaration, the Convention and the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, in which many of the standards related to the duty to investigate were developed and later enriched by the human rights mechanisms mandated to monitor and enforce them. 59. Article 18 of the Declaration prohibits amnesties or similar measures that might benefit persons who have or are alleged to have committed enforced disappearances. 28 The same article limits the right to pardon, taking into consideration the extreme seriousness of acts of enforced disappearance.29 25 26 27 28 29 8 The Declaration, the Convention and the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention on Human Rights), the American Convention on Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, “Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras”, judgment of 29 July 1988, para. 177. Nine years later, on 14 March 2001, in the case Barrios Altos v. Peru, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights established that amnesties in cases of grave violations of human rights, such as enforced disappearances, were against the American Convention on Human Rights. See also the Working Group’s general comment on article 17 of the Declaration (see E/CN.4/2001/68, paras. 25–32).