During an armed conflict, many people go missing, including both civilians and military personnel. The state has the following obligations in this respect:
- to account every case of disappearance;
- to maintain a registry of missing persons;
- to take effective actions aimed at searching for the missing and recovery;
- to investigate potential crimes or human rights violations, to bring those responsible to justice and establish the truth — specifically, what actually happened to the missing person — to ensure that relatives have the right to the truth;
- to ensure communication between government authorities and the families of the missing.
The state must legislate and maintain a legal framework capable of effectively performing these tasks.
The search for missing persons will continue for many years, even after the hostilities have ceased. Therefore, this mechanism must be sustainable and in line with the principle of effectiveness.
Under the current legal framework, searching for missing persons is complicated by the ongoing armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. Active military conflict and the hostilities have led to a sharp increase in the number of missing persons — both civilians and military — highlighting how the existing state framework is ill-equipped to search for them. In particular, it has been repeatedly confirmed that this framework (the so-called “police search model”) was designed to operate in peacetime, being unable to deal with the number of missing persons arising from a full-scale war of aggression. As of August 29, 2025, approximately 70,000 people have been entered into the Unified Register of Persons Missing under Special Circumstances. As of August 2024, 2,410 unidentified bodies (remains) were registered in the Register.
The framework currently provided for in the legislation poses numerous practical challenges, which overburden it and cause confusion among the relatives of missing persons and the general public. Furthermore, the existing framework does not fully serve its objective of searching for persons missing as a result of war, and under the current legal model, the search for such individuals is ineffective. Therefore, the existing framework requires a redistribution of the workload and a transition from the current legal model to another that would be better adapted to searching for both civilians and military personnel missing due to war, ensuring greater effectiveness in the long term.
The purpose of this analysis is to highlight the problems within the system of state regulation and management of matters relating to missing persons, compare national legislation with international recommendations and best practices, and illustrate the complexity of the procedures actually confronted by people attempting to locate their missing relatives. This analysis aims to highlight existing structural challenges in terms of appropriateness and effectiveness of the current legal framework for searching for missing persons, both for the victims and their relatives, and it is intended to protect their rights and legitimate interests.
How to Improve the Search System for Missing Persons? via the link.
