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In the aftermath of conflict and gross human rights violations, victims have a right to know what happened to their loved ones. Such a right is compromised if mass graves are not adequately protected to preserve evidence, facilitate identification and repatriation of the dead and enable a full and effective investigation to be conducted. Despite guidelines for investigations of the missing, and legal obligations under international law, it is not expressly clear how these mass graves are best legally protected and by whom. This article asks why, to date, there are no unified mass-grave protection guidelines that could serve as a model for states, authorities or international bodies when faced with gross human rights violations or armed conflicts resulting in mass graves. The paper suggests a practical agenda for working towards a more comprehensive set of legal guidelines to protect mass graves.
investigation, and not every grave is created for 146 Admir Jugo and Sari Wastell the same purpose. Criminal mass graves here constitute graves that are a result of a burial of extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions that break international humanitarian law and human rights laws. Non-criminal mass graves are for the practical purpose of temporary storage of human remains after disasters and crises, before the remains can be properly disposed of and buried at a later date. Remains placed in these mass graves are often tagged with a specific identification reference
the context of the requirements of international humanitarian law, aims to reconstruct, from whatever inscriptions it happened to leave on the corpse, the concrete resonance of the biological life system and the political social system in a particular historical moment. HRMV.indb 34 01/09/2014 17:28:34 The biopolitics of corpses 35 Conclusion Biopolitics is the historically specific structural coupling of the political social system and the biological life system. This structural coupling, which is always historically specific, is both inscribed on corpses of
