Search for remains a human rights matter

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/08/2023 (771 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s been looked at as a financial issue. As a safety issue. As an issue of the different treatment of people on racial grounds.

But maybe we should be thinking about the decision not to search the Prairie Green landfill for murdered Indigenous women as something much more fundamental than any of those things: maybe we should consider the lack of a full and thorough search as a human rights issue.

Are there particular government responsibilities when it comes to the basic human rights of people to be treated with dignity, even after their deaths?

The Office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights looked into that very question in 2017, when it looked at the deaths of migrants trying to reach Europe: in “Last Rights — The Dead, the Missing and the Bereaved at Europe’s International Borders”. As a result, the office drew up a proposal for the way individual countries should act to protect the rights of the dead.

It’s a valuable lens for considering whether or not three levels of government — municipal, provincial, and federal — have a responsibility under human rights legislation to search for people that they know to be missing, and in this particular case, where those missing people are in a known location.

The proposal says, “The human rights responsibilities of States towards the body of a dead person arise when the body is found within the territory of the State, including its territorial sea. Obligations also arise when there are reasonable grounds to believe that the body of a dead person is within the territory of the State, even if it has not yet been found. Obligations also exist with respect to the family and next-of-kin of the dead person…”

The proposal makes some key points about the legal obligation that governments are under to search for the missing.

“These core international legal obligations, many of which are subject to a requirement that reasonable means be exercised, may be summarized as follows: 1. To search for all missing persons; 2. To collect the bodies of the dead; 3. To respect the bodies of the dead; 4. To preserve any personal effects of the dead, and to restore them to the next of kin; 5. To take all reasonable steps to identify the deceased and to determine the cause of death; 6. To issue a death certificate; 7. To make every effort to locate and notify the relatives of the dead and missing; 8. To facilitate return of the remains of the dead to their relatives if possible…” the document says.

The key — in this case, perhaps — is the question of what constitutes “reasonable means.”

The provincial government has argued that potential threats to the safety of workers means a search of the Prairie Green landfill is unreasonable. The city of Winnipeg has said it simply doesn’t have the resources. And the federal government has said it can’t act without provincial co-operation.

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None of that extinguishes the question of what the human rights responsibilities are that our governments should be working within.

The question of whether a search is the appropriate approach, from the Office of the UN Commission for Human Rights proposal, is clearly spelled out.

Such searches regularly occur — and the remains of loved ones are returned to their families — sometimes years or even decades after someone goes missing, and sometimes at huge expense.

In this case, experts have said the work can be done safely.

So maybe let’s not scrabble endlessly through the reasons why the search of Prairie Green can’t be done, and deal with the established human rights analysis that it should be done.