Across South Asia, a chilling reality persists: countless men, women and children, spanning generations, have been subjected to enforced disappearance. Their fates sealed by the very institutions entrusted with their protection. Among the disappeared are journalists, activists, dissenters, and minority voices—individuals whose voices challenge authority and advocate for justice.
Enforced disappearance is a crime under international law and an insidious practice that not only persists as a relic of past conflicts but also still looms large as a contemporary instrument of oppression used by the states across the world as a tool to silence dissent and instill fear.
I keep all of Masood’s clothes, I can smell him in the clothes.
Amina Masood Janjua, wife of Pakistani businessman Masood Janjua
“I keep all of Masood’s clothes, I can smell him in the clothes. For years after his disappearance, every Eid, I used to buy him new clothes. I don’t lock doors since he was forcibly taken from us. If he comes back even in the middle of the night, he doesn’t have to wait outside” – Amina Masood Janjua, wife of Pakistani businessman Masood Janjua who was forcibly disappeared on 30 July 2005.
A person is forcibly disappeared when they have been apprehended by the authorities or their agents, or people acting with their authorization or acquiescence, but the authorities refuse to acknowledge this or conceal the person’s fate or whereabouts, placing them outside the protection of the law (art 2, International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, ICPPED) hence at risk of torture or extrajudicial execution. Sometimes, disappearance may also be committed by armed non-state actors, like armed opposition groups (art 3, ICPPED).
South Asia has a long history of enforced disappearances. Sometimes states have kept people in arbitrary detention 24 or 48 hours, in some cases, for a month, or a year – without revealing their whereabouts or release them, but in thousands of cases people have been missing for decades. Despite various commissions set up in most of the countries to investigate these crimes, they have hardly been successful in ensuring justice, and holding perpetrators accountable, thereby leaving families of the victims in a constant state of anguish.
To demonstrate the extent of the problem, Amnesty International partnered with more than 20 human rights organisations campaigning to end this culture of enforced disappearance in the region, and created this digital space—a place where the stories of the disappeared are memorialized. Together, we highlight some stories that are representative of broader patterns of enforced disappearances and provide the families of the disappeared an opportunity to unite in their demands for justice and accountability.
“We think of you every day. We fight for you ever day. The youngest is waiting for you to come home, to tell you that he loves you.
Sandya Eknaligoda, wife of disappeared Sri Lankan journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda
Explore their stories and stand in solidarity with them!
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Enforced disappearances are not just a nightmare from the past, they’re still happening in South Asia. 1000+ families are still looking for their relatives while states have failed to deliver justice. I stand in solidarity with the families. #StopEDs https://www.amnesty.org/en/projects/enforced-disappearance-in-south-asia
Hundreds of thousands disappeared
Pakistan
Enforced disappearances in Pakistan have been used as a political tool to silence the voices of political opponents, activists, journalists, and dissenters since the 1980’s. However enforced disappearances became more frequently deployed after 2001, during the ‘War on Terror’, as a counterterrorism strategy. The Pakistani Penal Code does not criminalise enforced disappearances, and various legal gaps have allowed this heinous crime to be committed in the country with impunity, leaving a trail of devastation in their wake.
Since 2011, at least 10,078 enforced disappearances were recorded by the Pakistan Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED). Of them, 3,485 took place in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 2,752 in Balochistan. Figures by human rights organisations and families suggest higher numbers.
In Pakistan, the recourse to enforced disappearance has evolved over time and a chilling pattern has emerged. While many remain disappeared, in other cases, the state, after briefly abducting people, releases them or uses draconian laws and trumped-up charges to silence them. In addition to these resurfaced disappearances, there have been instances of the same person being repeatedly abducted by the state.
Pakistan is also yet to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. There have been several attempts to criminalise enforced disappearance in Pakistan. On 7 June 2021, a proposed amendment to the Penal Code was presented before parliament by the Ministry of Human Rights, but it failed to meet the standards of international law and eventually lapsed in the Senate. Since then, owing in part to the political tumult in the country, Pakistan has made no meaningful effort to criminalize the practice.
Existing avenues do not prevent recurrence of the crime or protect victims’ families from harassment or threats and do not provide any means for redressal, rehabilitation, or financial support. Most of the families of forcibly disappeared people are unable to seek legal support to locate their loved ones due to socio-economic reasons despite broad constitutional safeguards and the application of the penal code as a protection against enforced disappearances. Their protests demanding justice continue despite resistance and harassment from the state.
Discover more stories of enforced disappearances
Discover some of the stories of enforced disappearance that show the magnitude of the issue across South Asia. Click on the map to know more of each of these stories.
Dr Deen Muhammad Baloch
Ornach, Khuzdar, Balochistan, Pakistan
Date of disappearance: 29 June 2009
Status: Forcibly disappeared
What happened:
On 29 June 2009, doctor Deen was asleep at a hospital in Ornach, Khuzdar, where he had decided to spend the night, planning to visit his daughter Sammi after she underwent surgery at another hospital about 400km away the following day. At 1:30am about 14 men entered his room by breaking down the door. Dressed in plain clothes, they identified themselves as agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence agencies, the military’s premier spy agency widely documented for their human rights abuses. Dr Deen resisted, according to the guard and cook who witnessed how he was assaulted, bound and dragged to a car barefoot and shirtless. When the guard tried to intervene, he was beaten up and locked inside a room with his hands tried. Armed men then seized Dr Deen’s house, confiscating all his belongings.
Dr Deen’s family rushed to the police, looking for answers. Instead, they were met with a blatant refusal to file a case against law enforcement agencies, and on the First Information Report were asked to write down under people responsible, “unknown persons”. Three days later, the family petitioned the Balochistan High Court. In April 2010, the case was closed due to a lack of progress.
Sammi recalls feeling hopeful when the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED) was formed by the Federal Goverment in 2011, with a mandate to “trace the whereabouts of allegedly enforced disappeared persons” and “fix responsibility on individuals or organizations responsible.” Despite living across the country, with unreliable network coverage and scarce resources, Sammi and her family appeared at every hearing – until the case was unceremoniously closed by the Commission in 2016, speculating that Dr Deen had fled the country or was a militant – claims they could provide no evidence for.
More details: Sammi is now 26 and has spent half her life advocating for her father’s release – or at the very least, securing information about his fate. She is now a leader for the Voice of Missing Baloch Persons, an NGO at the forefront of the campaign against enforced disappearances in Pakistan.
Partner organisation: Voice of Missing Baloch Persons
Sadiq and Zahid Amin
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Date of disappearance: 11 July 2014 and 9 March 2021
Status: Forcibly disappeared
What happened:
At 9:00pm on 11 July 2014, around 14 men, dressed in uniforms donned by the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD), went to the home of Zahid Amin in Rawalpindi. Zahid, who had been married for two years at this point, was not home. When he arrived, he was grabbed and taken away. When his family protested, they were told that Zahid was needed for questioning and would be released in three days.
The family immediately went to the police station, to discover that not only was Zahid not in their custody but that the police was refusing to investigate the case. The family was eventually compelled to file Zahid’s disappearance with the Commission of Inquiry for Enforced Disappearances (COIED) in 2017 – leading finally to the long overdue First Information Report being filed with the police. Effectively, that did nothing to bring the family closer to any answers. They petitioned the Lahore High Court in 2019, only for the case to be dismissed in light of Zahid’s disappearance being “handled” by the COIED. Despite the family’s efforts to locate him, his whereabouts remain unknown, casting his wife and family into financial and psychological despair.
Sadiq, after actively campaigning for his brother and returning from working abroad, faced a tragically similar fate in March 2021. In January 2020, Sadiq was approached by two men, Mohsin and Hamza, claiming to be from a special operatives branch of the government, inquiring about Zahid and his case while dressed in civilian clothes. This encounter was followed by a second meeting at Sadiq’s home, where they scrutinized his family details and requested identification and travel documents. Subsequent attempts to recontact the operatives led to a dead end as their number became inaccessible.
On the night of 9 March 2021, an armed group of ten to twelve men, wielding AK-47s and dressed in Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) uniforms marked “Special Ops,” forcibly entered Sadiq’s home. Accompanied by individuals in civilian attire, including two believed to be Punjab police officers, they demanded identification, subsequently abducting Sadiq barefoot and escaping in unmarked, light blue vehicles. Despite possessing CCTV evidence of the abduction, Sadiq’s family’s attempts to follow up via previously used contact numbers proved futile, leaving them in a state of distress and uncertainty regarding Sadiq’s fate.
The Amin family’s struggle has intensified to a breaking point as they continue to navigate legal channels including the police and courts, to be met with repeated directives to seek resolution through the COIED, a body they – like other families of the forcibly disappeared – have found to be painfully ineffective.
Despite attention from the Chief Justice of Pakistan, the prime minister’s office and Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, Sadiq and Zahid remain missing.
Partner organisation: Defense of Human Rights
Sajid Mehmood
Islamabad, Pakistan
Date of disappearance: 14 March 2016
Status: Forcibly disappeared
What happened:
Sajid Mehmood, a father of three daughters and a computer engineer who owned and operated a software company, was 39 at the time of his enforced disappearance. On 14 March 2016, ten men in civilian clothing and Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) uniforms, forced their way into Sajid’s house in Islamabad. They went from room to room, tossing the family’s belongings, confiscating their laptops, phones, and documents including their ID cards, driving licenses and degrees. The men then herded the family into a room and held them at gunpoint as they separated Sajid and took him away. At least seven neighbors witnessed when he was taken away from his home.”
Sajid’s wife, Mahira, tried to file a First Information Report so that the police could begin investigating his disappearance. She only managed to get one registered on 24 July 2016, once she went to the Commission of Inquiry for Enforced Disappearances (COIED), speaking about the deliberate obstruction created by law enforcement. The COIED created a Joint Investigation Team (JIT), but the family found them uninformed and unhelpful, even engaging in victim-blaming.
Seeing the abject failure of the police, COIED and JIT, Mahira took her case to the Islamabad High Court in August 2016. The proceedings highlighted failures across Pakistan’s security and law enforcement agencies. Despite orders for the intelligence agencies to report on Sajid’s custody status, both denied holding him. The JIT recognized the case as one of enforced disappearance, yet the Ministry of Defence denied having Sajid in custody. Mahira sought financial reparations for her family, leading to an important court order for the state to provide financial support – acknowledging a failure to protect Sajid.
However, appeals against this decision and the government’s non-compliance with the relevant court orders have left Sajid’s family in a protracted struggle for justice, with Sajid’s fate and whereabouts still unknown.
Partner organisation: Defense of Human Rights
Muhammad Idris Khattak
Swabi interchange of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province
Date of disappearance: 13 November 2019
Status: Initially, forcibly disappeared and now imprisoned in Adiala Central Jail in Rawalpindi
What happened:
Idris Khattak, a 59-year-old human rights defender who worked as a research consultant for Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Talk for Peace, was forcibly disappeared on 13 November 2019. Idris, a father of two daughters, was abducted by individuals suspected of being military agents, near Swabi Interchange while he was returning home from Islamabad. His driver was taken as well but was released two days later. He recounted how a group of unknown men put bags over their heads and drove them away.
Following Idris’ abduction, his residence was raided and his work-related materials were confiscated. His family was advised by their contacts in the army to not vocally campaign for his release. Despite filing a First Information Report and a habeas corpus petition, his whereabouts remained unknown. However, in June 2020 the Ministry of Defense disclosed that Idris was in military custody, and charged him with espionage and activities threatening national security.
Idris endured two years of illegal detention and torture, leading to a military court sentencing him to 12 years of rigorous imprisonment in December 2021 under charges of espionage, based on an alleged incident from a decade prior. The trial, lacking transparency and fairness (as is characteristic of military courts in Pakistan) denied Idris basic legal rights and subjected him to inhumane treatment, including physical abuse and solitary confinement. Idris was forced to sign false statements under duress, and was denied basic amenities and medical treatments, leading to a persistent skin infection. His daughter, Talia, spearheaded a campaign for his release, facing significant obstacles and threats to her safety. Despite her efforts, Idris remains imprisoned under harsh conditions, exacerbating concerns for his health given his diabetes.
Partner organisation: Amnesty International and the Khattak family
The Methodology
Amnesty International collaborated with more than 20 human rights organizations in South Asia. The details featured on this page are based on the information provided by our partner organizations. The information has been verified in accordance with Amnesty International’s guidelines and used with the informed consent of the families of the forcibly disappeared. In countries such as Afghanistan and India where state reprisals are severe and contacting families of the disappeared would put the families at greater risk, we have collected stories of the forcibly disappeared published in prominent media outlets. To safeguard the individuals and groups involved, meticulous care has been taken to anonymize sensitive information, ensuring that the identities of affected families remain confidential as and when necessary.
Acknowledging the pervasiveness of enforced disappearances in the region, Amnesty International decided to focus just on one or two decades per country, except for Afghanistan, where outreach efforts have been impeded due to high security risks and the details were collected without limiting to a decade. It is important to mention that the collection of verified stories does not reflect the total number of the disappeared even within the selected decades.
Partners
Families of the Disappeared, Human Rights Office, Affected Women’s Forum, Vikalpa, Human Rights Alert, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, For Peace Initiative Bhutan, Maldivian Democracy Network, Human Rights and Justice Center, Advocacy Forum
NSEC, Women for Human Rights, Story Kitchen, Defence of Human Rights, Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, Voice for Missing Person’s of Sindh, Human Rights Council of Balochistan, Rights Now Pakistan