A/HRC/59/49 consular services for family members of disappeared relatives abroad and, for those who flee political persecution, inability to contact their home country’s consulate.105 60. Another obstacle to adequate and thorough investigations is the reported practice of State authorities of labelling the cause of death as “natural” in cases of hypothermia and drowning related deaths during border crossings or pushback operations, thereby obscuring the involvement of other factors, including intentional acts by State actors, and thus perpetuating impunity in such cases. 106 61. The lack of information in different languages necessary to report disappearances, including enforced disappearances, particularly in languages of indigenous communities, results in limited access to justice, legal support and effective participation in search operations and investigations.107 B. Obstacles to adequate treatment of human remains 62. Migrant disappearances are compounded by the impossibility or unwillingness of authorities to carry out adequate and prompt identification procedures. This may be due to the geographical inaccessibility of sites where migrants disappear or to insufficient forensic capacity resulting from limited financial and logistical resources, including the complexity of identification processes owing to the transnational nature of such disappearances. 63. For example, forensic systems in the United States are decentralized and unregulated. 108 In the State of Texas, the decentralization of reporting and forensic mechanisms reportedly resulted in missing persons reports not being relayed to forensic authorities in Arizona. 109 Oftentimes, local and federal law enforcement agencies either refuse to search for disappeared migrants or delay searches until human remains are highly decomposed. Cremation of unidentified corpses or the burial of human remains in mass and unmarked graves are a significant additional challenge for identification procedures. 110 64. When human remains of disappeared or deceased migrants are located, they are not properly preserved because of the lack of specific protocols, mechanisms and public policies for the preservation, identification and repatriation of migrants’ remains. The involvement of forensic experts is reportedly rare owing to lack of clear procedural protocols. The recording of post-mortem data and the collection and archiving of personal belongings are carried out haphazardly, often without DNA sampling. 111 The lack of a centralized database for unidentified corpses, combined with procedural requirements that families of disappeared migrants are structurally unable to fulfil, further complicates identification and repatriation procedures.112 65. The erroneous or careless identification of human remains perpetuate the suffering of family members. In Honduras, families have received the remains of their loved ones who disappeared in Mexico, only to learn, after an independent DNA comparison, that the remains received did not belong to a member of their family.113 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 14 A/HRC/50/52, para. 8. D. Kerwin and D. E. Martínez, “Forced migration, deterrence, and solutions to the non-natural disaster of migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border and beyond”, Journal on Migration and Human Security, vol. 12, No. 3 (2024), p. 141. Submission by Fundación para la Justicia y el Estado Democrático de Derecho, 9. C. C. Siegert and others, “The Texas landscape: accounting for migrant mortality and the challenges of a justice of the peace medicolegal system”, Journal on Migration and Human Security, vol. 12, No. 3 (2024), p. 261. Maria Jimenez, Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border (2009). A/HRC/50/34, para. 85. Ibid. See submission by de: border migration justice collective. A/HRC/54/22/Add.2, para. 71.