“The Purloined Letter”: Migrant Disappearances, Systematic Impunity, and States’ Risk Awareness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The disappearance of migrants, which has reached preoccupying high numbers in recent decades, is related both to the particular vulnerability of migrants traversing dangerous migratory routes and to the high degree of impunity that characterizes investigation and search efforts required. This article argues that the disappearance of migrants at the hands of non-state actors in contexts of systematic impunity and in situations where the state had knowledge or should have had knowledge of a serious risk of such disappearance, but failed to act to prevent it, can be considered to have occurred with the acquiescence of the state. Thus, given that all further elements of the definition of enforced disappearance have been satisfied, this factual situation qualifies as an “enforced disappearance” for the purposes of international human rights law. Key to this demonstration is the concept of knowledge, which is an essential component of acquiescence. This article not only addresses the normative framework of acquiescence and its interpretation by international and regional human rights bodies, including how it relies on the element of state knowledge, but it also examines the extent to which this factor is critical to understanding states’ due diligence obligations to prevent, investigate, and sanction human rights obligations, including disappearances. In order to better understand the factors that should be taken into consideration while assessing a state‘s knowledge of migrant disappearances, including in the context of systematic impunity, it is then suggested to borrow from the international criminal law test related to the concept of “constructive knowledge” and to the doctrine of command responsibility. These considerations should inform a test for assessing whether disappearances of migrants occurring in contexts of systematic impunity can be considered as having been known by the state and as having occurred with its acquiescence and, thus, as constituting “enforced disappearances” under international human rights law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".