Every day, people all over the world leave their homes in search of a better life. On the road, many go missing. The mandate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to protect the lives and dignity of victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence includes, in certain contexts, protection of vulnerable migrants. The ICRC missing migrants pilot project aims to locate or clarify the fate of Zimbabwean migrants who went missing in South Africa, on behalf of their families. The ICRC aims to work with South African and Zimbabwean authorities to support and enhance existing systems, tools and resources used for locating missing relatives, living or dead. Additionally, the ICRC carries out and supports the activities of National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in the region to restore contact between and where possible reunify family members, in particular children, who have been separated by conflict, migration, displacement or natural or man-made disasters.

The Review has chosen to open this issue with the stories of family members of missing migrants in Zimbabwe. The section aims to show the everyday struggle, sometimes lasting for many years, of those that live with continuous uncertainty regarding the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones. As a result of the disappearances associated with migration, families searching for missing relatives often face a range of needs and challenges. These persons chose to share their life stories with the Review, allowing our readers to understand the intricate balance of uncertainty, hope and the “need to know” that family members of missing migrants live with every day. The testimonies were given to the ICRC in Zimbabwe in November 2017. In order to protect the families, their names have been omitted.

Since 2011, the humanitarian impact of the crisis in Syria has continued to worsen. The conflict is characterized by frequent violations of international humanitarian law (IHL): indiscriminate attacks in urban areas, the targeting of civilians and essential services such as water supply and health care, and the use of prohibited weapons, to name just a few. All of these have devastating consequences for the Syrian people, who are caught between the opposing sides. The conflict has brought not only bombs and missiles but also harsh living conditions, displacement, lack of access to food, water and medicine, uncertainty regarding the fate of missing or detained loved ones, and interruption of all aspects of life, including the education of a generation of Syrian children. Many people have fled, while others have stayed and attempted to live their lives amid the chaos of war.

In the face of these overwhelming needs, humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) struggle to respond. The ICRC is helping people both inside Syria, who are facing extremely difficult conditions because of the conflict, and the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere. In partnership with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, the ICRC distributes food and other essentials, restores water supplies and supports medical services.

In this interview, ICRC president Peter Maurer reflects on the complexities of the armed conflict in Syria, the difficulties of providing a neutral and impartial humanitarian response in this context and the importance of the parties to the conflict upholding their obligations to the civilian population.

Estela Barnes de Carlotto is an Argentinian human rights activist and president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. One of her daughters, Laura Estela Carlotto, was abducted while pregnant in Buenos Aires at the end of 1977. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo association was founded that same year, with the aim of recovering children kidnapped during the dictatorship, some of whom were born to abducted mothers. The Grandmothers seek both their grandchildren and their own children. They estimate that around 500 kidnapped grandchildren have been illegally adopted into other families.

This interview highlights the human cost of forced disappearance for the families left behind, who know neither the fate nor the whereabouts of their loved ones. Drawing on her vast experience of leading and advocating for these families, Estela gives us valuable insight into the role that relatives can play in developing mechanisms to trace missing people.

In the last thirty years, tens of thousands of Sri Lankans have experienced enforced disappearances of family members. In 2016, many members of such families came before the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms, which was mandated to gather views on how people thought the transitional justice mechanisms should be designed, how they should be established and how they should function. This process allowed the families to share their experiences and to outline what they saw as important in shaping the transitional justice mechanisms. This article surveys the complex nature of their distress and psychosocial needs, as expressed by them during the consultations. It proposes that transitional justice mechanisms should be designed to protect their psychosocial well-being, address their complex psychosocial needs, and provide them with support and protection before, during and after their engagement in the mechanisms.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have stood shoulder to shoulder in partnership to help the most vulnerable and address the needs of millions of people throughout Syria. Particularly since 2011, the two organizations have collaborated to respond to diverse humanitarian needs with the ultimate goal of protecting human dignity.

The tradition of providing refuge to people who are fleeing and in need of protection is a long-standing one, present throughout history and in various contexts, and now embedded in international law. The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2016, reaffirmed international refugee protection standards and provided a model for a more comprehensive response to large-scale refugee movements, based on shared global responsibility for refugees. It represented a critical development at a time when international cooperation aimed at preventing, responding to and resolving conflicts is proving inadequate, and an increasing number of people are being internally displaced, forced across borders or left in protracted exile as a result of conflict, violence and persecution. In this interview, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees shares his thoughts on some of today's most significant forced displacement challenges, and the prospects presented by the New York Declaration.

The organizational errors of Syrian urban planning have been a major cause of the escalation of the Syrian crisis and its continuation. Syrian cities, including Damascus and its environs, have suffered from the fragility of social security, which is manifested in the form of cohesive human groups in closed communities, influenced by religion, culture, family, class, place of origin of the population, occupation, etc. This article examines the fragility of security during the crisis of 2011–18, with the aim of clarifying the impact of the organizational problems and the processing delay that has generated social security fragility because these closed communities are looking for their own security and safety outside the control of local administrations. The article proposes that the inherent fragility of security in Damascus and its environs should be associated with poverty, organizational errors and slums as a model for the fragility of all Syrian cities.

Families of the missing often have no facts to clarify whether their loved one is alive or dead, or if dead, where the remains are located. Such loss is called “ambiguous loss”, and those suffering from it will usually resist change and will continue to hope that the missing person will return. As this article will endeavour to explain, our goal as professionals working with the families of the missing is to help them shift to another way of thinking that allows them to live well despite ambiguous loss. To do this, we must acknowledge that the source of suffering – the ambiguity – lies outside the family. The article offers a psychosocial model with six guidelines focusing on meaning, mastery, identity, ambivalence, attachment, and finding new hope.

Established in war, embedded in communities and operational in every major natural and man-made disaster, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (the Movement) – including 191 National Societies – is uniquely positioned to address the humanitarian needs of migrants at all points of their journey. With migration on the rise and an area of intense debate, this article examines the work of Australian Red Cross and the collective efforts of the International Federation of Red Cross Red and Red Crescent Societies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Asia Pacific Migration Network, particularly across 2015-17, to support the Movement in the region in providing assistance and protection to those who are most vulnerable. It considers the progress made so far, and the potential of the Movement to engage more effectively and collaboratively on opportunities and challenges into the future.

Looking at the physical damage caused by the Syrian war, one can begin to imagine the scale of the psychological toll that eight years of crisis have taken on the Syrian people. In a country where mental health was still considered an emerging field before the war, Syrians are working to address and manage the mental health and psychological effects of war. Despite this disastrous situation, there appears to have been significant progress in the field of mental health during the crisis. This article explores the mental health situation in Syria prior to 2011, the effects of the crisis on Syrians, and how these have been managed in recent years. It concludes by citing some examples of progress that have been made in mental health care in Syria and discussing some of the challenges that remain to be addressed.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has a long history of working with missing persons and their families. Based on its statutory mandate as enshrined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, their 1977 Additional Protocols, the Statutes of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and resolutions of the International Conferences of the Red Cross and Red Crescent,1 the ICRC has worked to prevent people from going missing and has facilitated family contact and reunification. It has also worked to clarify the fate and whereabouts of missing persons since 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, when it pioneered the compilation of lists of prisoners of war and the introduction of “the wearing of a badge so that the dead could be identified”.2

The ICRC promoted and strengthened its engagement towards missing persons and their families when it organized the first ever International Conference of Governmental and Non-Governmental Experts on Missing Persons in 2003.3 Today, the ICRC carries out activities in favour of missing persons and their families in around sixty countries worldwide. In 2018, it embarked on a new project setting technical standards in relation to missing persons and their families, together with expert partners and a global community of practitioners who have a shared objective – preventing people from going missing, providing answers on the fate and whereabouts of missing persons, and responding to the specific needs of their families.

This Q&A explores the ICRC's current work on the issue of the missing and will, in particular, explore the ways in which the ICRC's Missing Persons Project aims to position the missing and their families at the centre of the humanitarian agenda.

In 2016, thousands of young migrants were stranded in Calais, France, in the “Jungle” refugee camp. This paper aims to provide an overview of the British Red Cross's response and of how the organization engaged in numerous activities to secure their safety, culminating in a transfer of children to the United Kingdom.

International humanitarian law and international human rights law seek to prevent people from going missing, and to clarify the fate and whereabouts of those who do go missing while upholding the right to know of their relatives. When implementing international law at the domestic level, national authorities should plan carefully before engaging in any policy or legal reform that will address the issue of missing persons and the response to the needs of their families. This article seeks to present a general overview of the provisions of international law that are relevant to understanding the role of national implementation vis-à-vis the clarification of the fate and whereabouts of missing persons and the response to the needs of their relatives. It also presents the role that the ICRC has played in this regard and highlights three challenges that may arise at the national level when working on legal and policy reforms.

The Honduran Red Cross began working in the area of migration in July 2012, when it set up the Migrant Assistance Module in Corinto for Honduran migrants returning over land at the Honduran–Guatemalan border. The Honduran Red Cross has helped hundreds of returning and irregular migrants, thanks to agreements with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Migration Institute. It has also worked with other National Red Cross Societies in the region, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have helped it to strengthen its capacity and build a comprehensive vision for the protection and assistance of migrants. This article summarizes the action that the Honduran Red Cross has undertaken with respect to migration and explores the services provided at the Corinto module, the Honduran Red Cross's subsequent management of the Returning Migrant Assistance Centre in Omoa and other care centres for migrants returning because of their irregular status, and the development and implementation of projects on migration and related topics.

The role normally played by monuments in conflict is that of passive and innocent observers, occasionally drawn into the fighting through their locations. In the Syrian conflict, monuments have been more deliberately used as pawns, as ideological weapons and as favoured strongpoints for combatants. The resulting damage to historical sites, particularly to the monumental centres of Aleppo and Palmyra, has been considerable. However, damage to heritage presents a small proportion of the harm compared to the destruction of civilian housing and facilities throughout the country and should not distract us from the irreplaceable loss of innocent life in the fighting. The country's eventual recovery will require the return of refugees to their devastated communities, a precondition for any effort to restore the country's rich monumental heritage.

Now in its ninth year, the armed conflict in Nigeria has forced more than 2 million people from their homes, with more than 1.5 million of these displaced within the country. The regionalized conflict – which since 2013 has affected the neighbouring countries of Cameroon, Chad and Niger – has caused a protracted humanitarian crisis with some of the highest human costs in the world. The most affected area in Nigeria is the northeast of the country, primarily the States of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe.

The use of chemical weapons in the armed conflict in Syria has attracted universal and widespread condemnation and has led to unified responses by various international bodies. This article examines the international community's responses to chemical weapons use in Syria from the perspective of international law. It also analyzes the potential options for accountability that are available for chemical weapons-related crimes. The intention is ultimately to make the case that the special status the international community has ascribed to chemical weapons crimes could be harnessed to create an accountability mechanism, such as an ad hoc tribunal, that could help pave the complex road towards a negotiated peace.