NAME OF MECHANISM

Commission of Inquiry

PERIOD OF OPERATION

January – July 2000. The commission’s three-month mandate was extended by an additional three months. Its final report was released in July 2000.

MANDATE AND OPERATIONS

Mandate: The Commission of Inquiry was set up by Resolution No. 60/2000 signed by Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss on 21 January 2000. Its mandate was to investigate and “resolve” the 17,000 disappearances that occurred during the Lebanese civil war, between 1975 and 1990.

Staff: The commission was headed by an army general. The other four members were officers of the army, general security, state security and internal security [Lebanese Information Center | 2000].

RESULTS

The commission received 2,046 applications from families of victims and wrote a final report. The government has made public only a three-page summary of the commission's work. According to the summary, “bodies were discarded in different places in Beirut, Mount Lebanon, the North, Bekaa and the South; and some were buried in mass graves.” Some bodies were thrown into the sea. The summary concluded that apart from 17 people detained in Israel, all those missing for more than four years should be considered dead, and recommended that their families register their deaths [HRW | 2009]. The commission has been criticised for being composed entirely of members of the armed and security forces and thus lacking independence [AI | 2011].

On 12 December 2000, the commission lost credibility when 54 individuals who had been missing for more than four years were released from a Syrian prison [State Dept | 2002].

BACKGROUND

Thousands of cases of enforced disappearances and abductions carried out during the 1971–1990 civil war remain unresolved. According to Amnesty International, the Lebanese authorities have “generally failed to protect mass graves and to conduct exhumations from the civil war period” [AI | 2010].

On 23 October 2009, the judge of summary procedures of Beirut ordered the Council of Ministers' secretariat to provide the court with “the unpublished full report and results of the investigations conducted by the Official Commission of Investigation into the Fate of the Abducted and Disappeared Persons in 2000,” as well as to provide it with information relating to two mass graves in Beirut. Human rights groups continue to demand that the secretariat conform with this order and that it make the commission’s findings public [HRW | 2009].

SOURCES

[Amnesty International | 2010]
[Amnesty International | 2011]
[United States Department of State | 2002] 
[Human Rights Watch | 2009]
[Lebanese Information Center | 2000]