Dear Colleague

Just over 1 year ago, the Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe (FASE), the first subsection of the International Academy of Legal Medicine (IALM), was founded in Milan on the occasion of the 23rd IALM congress. At 1 year after its foundation we already have 40 new IALM FASE members and have organised and completed the first FASE meeting in Frankfurt.

The number of registrations for this first meeting was 58, excluding invited guest speakers: 24 oral presentations and 14 posters, most of high quality, were presented, along with a plenary session on the role and teaching of forensic anthropology across Europe. Participants came from France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States, Colombia, the Canary Islands and South America. The discussion following the plenary lecture led to the perception of a very strong common interest in this field, its strong links to forensic pathology, its multidisciplinarity, but also a lack of proper training, postgraduate courses, common guidelines and communication.

The Board, at a meeting held during the congress, therefore decided to commit itself for the next 2 years to the following issues:

  • Maximising the number of meetings: for 2005 in Monastir (in connection with the Mediterranean Society of Forensic Medicine meeting) with a 1-day workshop on “building the biological profile”, and for 2006 in Budapest (in connection with the IALM meeting) preceded or followed by the 5-day workshop (European Workshop of Forensic Anthropology) held in Europe every second year.

  • A website for continuous information on FASE but also for forums and discussion (at the moment the FASE website is hosted on the site of LABANOF, Laboratorio di Antropologia e Odontologia Forense, Istituto di Medicina Legale, Milano, at http://users.unimi.it/labanof).

  • Creating common FASE-IALM guidelines and recommended protocols across Europe, to be published and constantly updated, for various issues: biological profiles, aging the living, identification, trauma, time since death, etc.

  • Developing international relations for the study of victims of war crimes and for the education of local pathologists. Requests and initial relations have already been established with the Red Cross in Geneva (Dr Morris Tidball-Bitz) and in South America.

However, this initial boost needs to be rendered public. We would therefore like to ask you if it would be possible to dedicate one number of the IJLM to this issue (forensic anthropology and odontology) just as you have done for entomology in the past issue. This would be an enormous contribution on the part of the IALM in giving voice to its first subsection.

We envisage the special edition as follows:

  • An introductory note on FASE written by the Board members (goals, organisation, how to register, etc.)

  • A note on the results of the cross-European plenary lecture concerning the role and training in forensic anthropology and odontology across Europe

  • Publication of selected articles from the congress (most of them), with four to five pages dedicated to the others as abstracts. To this purpose we can guarantee appropriate peer review, as three of the FASE Board members are editors/advisors for international journals on forensic anthropology and odontology.

We do trust that you will agree to promoting this young subsection of the International Academy of Legal Medicine.

Sincerely,

Prof. E. Baccino

FASE President