Christmas tree for missing persons

A Christmas tree for missing persons has been put up in the yard of the old Nicosia Town Hall to symbolise the determination to continue to establish the fate of every single person deemed missing since 1974.

Presidential Commissioner, Photis Photiou, who attended the ceremony on Thursday, said the tree also symbolised the shame that world powers continue to tolerate Turkey’s occupation of the north of the island. Ankara, he said does not cooperate on the humanitarian issue of the missing.

Photiou said that 46 years after the Turkish invasion “we are still looking for more than 800 missing persons”.

He added that on Human Rights Day, which is marked on December 10, if there was one country which did not respect human rights, it was Turkey, “which does not respect the decisions of the UN, the European Council, the European Parliament as well as the European Court of Human Rights decisions as regards the missing persons”.

Nicosia Mayor, Constantinos Yiorkadjis wished that this would be the last year that this humanitarian issue remained unsolved.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.