Presumed Death and the Need for Its Regulation
The rising number of missing persons has once again sparked debate over the need to legislate for appropriate treatment of disappearance and presumed death.
In the Dominican legal system, there is no specific norm, mechanism, or procedure for declaring a person deceased when death is presumed after a certain period has elapsed since the declaration of absence or disappearance under special circumstances. Article 189 of Law No. 4-23, Organic Law on Civil Status Acts, merely mentions the declaration of death concerning its registration by civil registry offices, but it does not establish any mechanism or procedure.
In the Dominican Republic, judicial declarations of death have only been established through specific laws and on rare occasions to address presumed death cases resulting from exceptional or dangerous circumstances due to disasters or catastrophic events that justify the presumption of death. These laws include: (i) Law No. 5818 of February 20, 1962, concerning individuals who were part of the armed expeditions that entered the country through Constanza, Maimón, and Estero Hondo from June 14 to 20, 1959; (ii) Law No. 5832 of March 2, 1962, concerning persons who disappeared during the dictatorship of Rafael L. Trujillo and are seriously presumed to have died; (iii) Law No. 87 of December 19, 1965, concerning individuals who disappeared during the armed conflict that began on April 24, 1965, and are seriously presumed to have died; and (iv) Law No. 41-24 of July 24, 2024, concerning individuals who went missing in the area of the old market in the municipality of San Cristóbal, San Cristóbal Province, during the explosion that occurred on August 14, 2023.
For families, coping with unresolved grief while simultaneously undergoing bureaucratic, judicial, or administrative procedures means navigating a long path filled with obstacles and difficulties. Under the current legal framework, the legal effects of death—such as the opening of succession, the termination of parental authority, and the dissolution of marriage—occur only after the transcription of the death declaration before a civil registry officer. The lack of a legal framework due to a clear legislative omission worsens the emotional trauma of loss and becomes a barrier that prevents family members and legal successors from addressing and resolving matrimonial, inheritance, corporate, administrative, and economic matters arising in the familial, work, and professional spheres of the missing and absent individuals.
The legislator, by constitutional mandate, has the right to initiate laws, and such power cannot be exercised in disregard of the social context. Their duty and commitment must always align with the sacred responsibility of representing the people who elected them, as established by our Constitution. Upon the legislator falls the task of proposing a law that establishes the procedure for declaring presumed death in the aforementioned scenarios—thus ending the indefinite state of absence or disappearance that affects these individuals, which is incompatible with a Social and Democratic Rule of Law.
