The right to mourn:

the international construction of the right to mourn of relatives of victims of enforced disappearance

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2024/74783i

This paper seeks to map, through a dialogue between international human rights organizations, some of the legal contours of the right to mourn of relatives of victims of enforced disappearance. This paper seeks to reflect on the potentialities, tensions and limits that emerge from the international legal construction of the right to mourn, considering the Brazilian transitional justice experience. It is argued that the right to mourn carries a central problem: on the one hand, there is a clear need to create legal responses capable of effectively supporting the specific condition of the relatives of missing persons, but, on the other hand, there are many limits of the law when dealing with a process as singular and complex as mourning. Throughout the development of this study, we sought to demonstrate that the emergence of the right to mourn at the international level, although important (as a tool to combat state violence) must, permanently, deal with the limits of the law in the face of the families' unique mourning process.

Keywords: Enforced disappearance; Right to Mourn; Human Rights; Transitional Justice.