CCPR/C/113/D/2028/2011 and having obligations.b In this regard, article 16 is doubtless one of the most direct expressions in international human rights law of the principle of respect for the dignity of the human person: the very fact of being human entails the right of recognition of legal personality, irrespective of the legal capacity of the person concerned (for example, an infant has the right to recognition of legal personality even if he/she has a limited capacity that precludes the enjoyment of all rights). And, as stressed by the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, enforced disappearances constitute a paradigmatic violation of the right to recognition of legal personality. c From its very first report, the Working Group considered that the practice of enforced disappearances violated this right, among others, and its position in this regard has never changed.d The Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance likewise recognizes this link in its article 1, paragraph 2, which states that “[a]ny act of enforced disappearance places the persons subjected thereto outside the protection of the law ... It constitutes a violation of the rules of international law guaranteeing, inter alia, the right to recognition as a person before the law”. 5. It is true that, for a long while, the Committee did not seem inclined to take this dimension into account. It was only in 2007 that it decided, in its conclusions in response to a claimant, to find a violation of article 16 in relation to an enforced disappearance. e Its example was followed two years later by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Anzualdo-Castro v. Peru.f It was in order to encourage and further develop this line of reasoning that the Working Group decided in 2011 to adopt a general comment on the right to recognition as a person before the law in the context of enforced disappearances. In it, the Working Group established a link between the right to recognition of legal personality and one of the components of enforced disappearance: the fact of the person being “placed outside the protection of the law”. 6. The general comment adds that “[t]his means that not only the detention is denied, and/or the fate or the whereabouts of the person are concealed, but that while deprived of his/her liberty, this person is denied any right under the law, and is placed in a legal limbo, in a situation of total defencelessness”. 7. The general comment continues that: Enforced disappearances entail the denial of the disappeared person’s legal existence and, as a consequence, prevent him or her from enjoying all other human rights and freedoms. The disappeared person may keep his or her name, at least when the birth has been registered (and except in cases when the true identity of children, who have been taken away from their parents, is falsified, concealed or destroyed), but he/she is not shown in the record of detainees; neither is the name kept in the registers of deaths. The disappeared is de facto deprived of his or her domicile. His/her properties become frozen in a legal limbo since no one, not even the next-of-kin, b c d e f 18 See A. Verdoodt, Naissance et signification de la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’Homme, Louvain-Paris, Société d’études morales, sociales et juridiques, Editions Nauwelaerts, 1964, pp. 108– 111. See also Manfred Nowak, United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. CCPR Commentary, Kehl, N.P. Engel, 1993, pp. 282 and 283. See A/HRC/19/58/Rev.1, para. 42. See E/CN.4/1435, para. 184. See communications No. 1328/2004, Kimouche v. Algeria, Views adopted on 10 July 2007; and No. 1327/2004, Grioua v. Algeria, Views adopted on 10 July 2007, paras. 7.8 and 7.9. See Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Ser. C, No. 202, judgement of 22 September 2009, paras. 90 and 91.