Missing Persons In Cyprus

EDM number 1081 in 2009-10, proposed by Edward O'Hara on 12/03/2010.
Categorised under the topics of Burial and cremation and Western Europe.

That this House notes the recent discovery of a mass grave in Lapithos containing remains identified as those of Fivos Christofi from Aglantzia, Kostas Kapsokaritis from Tseri and Michalakis Anastasiou from Famagusta, who will be remembered at the forthcoming Annual General Meeting of the Organisation of Relatives of Missing Cypriots (UK); welcomes all such discoveries which are being made by exhumation teams of both sides of the buffer zone in Cyprus; recognises the generosity of those countries, agencies and individuals who have donated finance, technical support and forensic expertise to locating, exhuming and identifying the remains of those missing since the invasion of Cyprus in 1974; is conscious however that to date no more than 10 per cent. of the missing have been located; recalls the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that Turkey is in violation of articles 2, 3 and 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights through its failure to collect, record and disclose information about those known and seen to be alive after their capture in 1974; sympathises with the missing persons' relatives who in the words of this judgment must have suffered most painful uncertainty and anxiety and whose mental anguish has not vanished with the passing of time; and calls on the Government to exert all possible influence on Turkey to comply with the ECHR judgment and to assist and co-operate in tracing and identifying the remains of the missing, thus permitting relatives to have closure to their grief and bereavement.

This motion has been signed by a total of 28 MPs.