Collecting authoritative contributions, this book combines the life experience of victims with the expertise of scholars and practitioners of human rights, psychoanalysis, and artists to compose a picture that renders the complexity of this crime in its legal, psychological, and social aspects.

Part 1: Enforced Disappearance in the Contemporary World 1. Enforced disappearances in the contemporary world: The recent contributions of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances 2. The curse of ambiguity: The traumatic memory of victims of enforced disappearance 3. Mourning the disappeared: A personal account Part 2: Enforced Disappearance and Human Rights 4. The law in front of the denial of the law 5. The psychological impact of enforced disappearance on victims in light of international human rights law 6. The value and need for incorporating a psychosocial approach to forensic case-work in cases of extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, including those who do not survive enforced and involuntary disappearances 7. Fifty shades of suffering? The wavering international jurisprudence on relatives of disappeared persons as victims of human rights violations 8. The fight against impunity for enforced disappearances: A historical and personal account Part 3: Enforced Disappearance in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytical Perspectives 9. Memories of enforced disappearance: Psychological need and political aim 10. Tortured and disappeared bodies: The problem of `knowing¿ 11. Enforced disappearances and its perpetrators: The psychosis of total loss 12. "Can you describe this?": United Nations officers and the families of the disappeared 13. Traumatic traces of enforced disappearance through generations: From psychoanalytic theory to a family case study 14. Names without bodies and bodies without names: Ambiguous loss and closure after enforced disappearance 15. An Art Work for the "Jardin des Disparus" ¿ in Meyrin, Switzerland "QUESTION MARK"