CCPR/C/113/D/2022/2011 recognition of legal personality. c In its first report, the Working Group considered that the practice of enforced disappearance violated this right, among others, and it has never changed its position (see E/CN.4/1435, para. 184). The Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance recognizes this link, in article 1 (2): “Any 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.” 4. It is true that, for some time, the Committee seemed unwilling to take this dimension into account. It was not until 2007 that it decided, concerning the conclusions of a claimant, to declare a violation of article 16 in connection with an enforced disappearance.d The decision on this ground was followed two years later by the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights in the case of Anzualdo-Castro v. Peru.e It was to encourage and further this trend in case law that the Working Group decided in 2011 to adopt the general comment on the right to recognition as a person before the law in the context of enforced disappearances. In paragraphs 1 and 2 of the general comment, the Working Group draws a connection between the right to recognition as a person before the law and one of the constituent elements of enforced disappearance, i.e. the fact that the person is placed “outside the protection of the law”: This 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. 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, may dispose of that patrimony until the disappeared appears alive or is declared dead, that is a “non-person”. 5. Placing a person outside the protection of the law is the key element that differentiates an enforced disappearance from certain forms of deprivation of liberty, during which the right of a third person to obtain information on the detention is sometimes greatly restricted. Articles 18, 19 and 20 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance seek to clarify the rules governing this right to information on the part of third parties, thus setting out the outline of a kind of habeas data. In particular, article 20 (1) reads as follows: Only where a person is under the protection of the law and the deprivation of liberty is subject to judicial control may the right to information referred to in article 18 be restricted, on an exceptional basis, where strictly necessary and where provided for by law, and if the transmission of the information would c d e General comment on the right to recognition as a person before the law in the context of enforced disappearances, para. 42. Communications No. 1328/2004, Kimouche v. Algeria and No. 1327/2004, Grioua v. Algeria, 10 July 2007, paras. 7.8. and 7.9. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Series C, No. 202, judgement of 22 September 2009, paras. 90-91. 17