Editor’s note: Seymur Mammadov is the editor-in-chief of News.Az and director of the international expert club EurAsiaAz. This article reflects the author’s personal views and does not necessarily represent those of News.Az.
More than thirty years is a long time in a human life. A child who was five or ten in the early 1990s would be an adult today. They might have a family, children, a career — an entirely different life. But for the families of 71 Azerbaijani children, time has effectively stood still: their fate remains unknown.
On 5 October, at a meeting of the Third Committee of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, Shahriyar Hajiyev, First Secretary of Azerbaijan’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, once again raised the issue internationally. He stated that the fate and whereabouts of 71 children among more than 4,000 Azerbaijanis who went missing in the early 1990s remain unaccounted for.
Azerbaijan called for more active international cooperation to establish what happened to them.
At first glance, the prospects of finding answers might seem to diminish after more than three decades. Witnesses grow older, documents may be lost, burial sites change, and the political circumstances surrounding conflicts undergo repeated transformations.
Yet international experience suggests otherwise.
Across the world, people who disappeared during wars, dictatorships and internal conflicts have been located and identified decades later. In some cases, children presumed missing were found alive: they had grown up under different names, been placed with other families or taken abroad. In others, remains were recovered and identified through DNA analysis and modern forensic techniques.
The case of the 71 Azerbaijani children must therefore be understood as an unresolved humanitarian issue, rather than simply a tragic chapter of the past.
Source: Cyprus Business News
Cyprus: Answers can emerge even half a century later
Cyprus offers one of the clearest examples. Following the intercommunal violence of the 1960s and the events of 1974, thousands of families were left without answers about their relatives. In 1981, the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus, or CMP, was established with the assistance of the United Nations. Its work is practical: locating suspected burial sites, exhuming remains, conducting anthropological examinations and DNA analysis, identifying individuals and returning their remains to their relatives.
Perhaps the most significant point is that this mechanism continues to operate more than half a century after the events that caused these disappearances. By mid-2026, the remains of more than a thousand missing people from both Cypriot communities had been identified and returned to their families. That fact alone refutes the claim that searching becomes pointless after several decades. It does not.
Modern science can provide information that was unavailable in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s. DNA analysis, the digitisation of archives, satellite data, comparisons of historical maps and renewed witness interviews can all revive investigations that appeared hopeless for decades.
The Cypriot experience also demonstrates something else: success requires a mechanism that works continuously, rather than merely responding to successive political statements.
Source: Getty Images
El Salvador: Children who disappeared during the war
Hundreds of children disappeared during El Salvador’s civil war between 1980 and 1992. Some were taken during military operations. Others subsequently ended up with adoptive families. Some may have been taken abroad. Their names, documents and effectively their entire previous identities could have been changed.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child addressed the issue over many years. UN documents referred to more than 700 disappeared children. Over time, the fate of hundreds was established through the efforts of families, nongovernmental organisations, state institutions and sustained international attention.
This is an exceptionally important precedent because it shows that “missing” does not necessarily mean “dead”.
A child could have survived the conflict, ended up with another family in another country, received a new name and documents, and spent decades unaware of their true origins. For precisely this reason, investigations into such cases must extend beyond suspected burial sites.
Equally important are the archives of children’s institutions, records of population movements, information on detainees and captives, hospital records, testimony from military personnel and civilians, adoption documents, migration records and, of course, genetic databases.
Source: IMBb
Argentina: Recovering an identity decades later
Argentina provides another well-known example.
During the military dictatorship of 1976–1983, some women held in detention were separated from their newborn babies. The children were placed with other families and registered under different identities. Their relatives continued searching for decades.
Argentina subsequently established a dedicated mechanism for restoring identities, making extensive use of genetic testing. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo organisation played a crucial role. Ultimately, more than a hundred people abducted as babies or children during the dictatorship were able, decades later, to discover their true origins and recover their identities.
Some had lived under other names for decades before learning who they really were. Argentina’s experience is particularly significant because of its use of DNA evidence. A witness’s memory can fail. A document can be destroyed or falsified. A person can change their name. But genetic relationships endure.
Kuwait and Iraq: Remains recovered decades later
Another important international precedent concerns the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Hundreds of people were listed as missing. The issue remained on the UN Security Council’s agenda for many years. Kuwait, Iraq, the International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations bodies participated in the search process.
Decades passed, but the search continued.
Many years after the war ended, human remains were discovered in Iraq. Some were subsequently identified through DNA analysis and returned to their families. Once again, the lesson is clear: thirty years is no reason to close a case. As long as archives, witnesses, information about possible burial sites, documents and biological samples from relatives remain available, there are still opportunities to establish the truth.
Source: AFP
What can the UN do?
The United Nations does not have a universal investigative service that receives a list of missing people and automatically begins conducting excavations or investigations around the world. The mechanisms involved are considerably more complex.
There are, however, UN bodies that can raise individual cases with governments, request information, facilitate international cooperation, monitor compliance with obligations and press for investigations to continue.
The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, for example, has existed since 1980. One of its central humanitarian functions is to assist families in determining the fate or whereabouts of disappeared relatives through communication with the governments concerned.
It is important, however, to distinguish legally between a “missing person” and a “victim of enforced disappearance”. Not every disappearance during an armed conflict automatically falls within the latter definition; this depends on the circumstances of each case.
But a much broader principle of international humanitarian law applies: families have the right to know what happened to their relatives. This is particularly important in Azerbaijan’s case. An armed conflict may end, but its humanitarian consequences do not automatically end with it.
International experience shows that mechanisms established with UN participation and support can deliver tangible results even decades later.
Cyprus is one of the clearest examples. International assistance helped establish a permanent mechanism through which more than a thousand missing people were identified and their remains returned to their relatives.
In other countries, international attention, the work of specialised bodies, access to archives and modern DNA technology have also helped establish the fate of people who had been missing for decades.
If this approach has worked in other conflicts, it should work for Azerbaijan as well.
Baku’s appeal must not become another statement delivered in a UN meeting room and then buried in the proceedings. The United Nations must hear Azerbaijan. The fate of 71 children is at stake.
The United Nations and other international bodies should help establish an effective mechanism to determine what happened to them and press for full cooperation from Armenia.
Above all, this should involve the release of all available information that may be relevant to these individuals: military and state archives from the early 1990s, records of facilities where captives and detainees were held, registration logs, records of civilian population movements, information on possible burial sites and any other material that could shed light on the fate of the missing children.
If witnesses, archival records, maps of possible burial sites, documents concerning people’s movements or other information could assist the search, that information must not remain inaccessible after more than three decades.
The United Nations has already participated in mechanisms that helped families in other countries obtain answers decades after conflicts ended.
This raises a reasonable question: if the international community was able to help families in Cyprus, El Salvador, Argentina and elsewhere, why should the same principle not apply to the families of these 71 Azerbaijani children?
This is a matter of the universal right of every family to know what happened to its child, rather than a political privilege or special treatment for any party.
That is why the international community must go beyond calls for cooperation and press for specific answers, documents and information in each of these 71 cases.
Until those answers are obtained, the issue cannot be considered closed.
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