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The attempt to rescue the OMP 

03 Feb 2022

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) wrote to the United Nations (UN) Working Group on Enforced Disappearances Chairperson Tae-Ung Baik, alerting the Group about the attempts by the present Government of Sri Lanka to undermine and virtually abolish the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) in Sri Lanka. In the AHRC letter, a report on the data collected by the first batch of Commissioners who headed the OMP has also been submitted.   According to the report issued by the OMP on 30 July 2020, it has collected data from the 25 districts in Sri Lanka and the total number of complaints recorded amounts to 21,000 persons who are considered as having disappeared. The AHRC also received the names and details of about 750 persons recorded from three districts.  The reason for the expression of concern is a widespread scepticism and fear shared by many human rights organisations and also some of the former Commissioners about the number of new appointees to the position of Commissioners when the period of the office of the former Commissioners expired. The AHRC later states that an issue of concern arose when the terms of office of the first batch of Commissioners appointed by the previous government came to an end – rendering their positions vacant. Presently, the new Government is making appointments at random. The explanation of the observers and civil society organisations is that the new appointments are persons who are opposed to the carrying out of the OMP’s mandate. Persons who have worked closely in the past with the OMP have raised the following questions:
  1. Will the evidence collected so far be destroyed? If there was no evidence collected under the previous term of the first Commissioners being in office, would it be considered lost?
  2. Will the database be tampered with?
  3. Will the persons who have made complaints be subjected to various forms of harassment?
These concerns we believe are well founded, based on the experiences of many other cases on other human rights violations and crimes. In many of these cases, the files have gone missing or criminal investigations have not been conducted at all. This is a very serious situation. There is a possibility that even the limited amount of work done in the creation of the OMP, which was the result of many years of hard work by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and her office, the efforts of the office of the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances and also efforts particularly by several European Union (EU) countries which have been consistently working since 2009 to get a proper investigation into the large numbers of complaints of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka, will be to no avail. For several years, the Sri Lankan governments refused to take any steps to investigate this matter. However, the government which was in power from 2015 to 2019 agreed to co-operate with the recommendations by the UN agencies and as a measure to collect fact finding data on missing persons, this particular OMP was created. The first batch of Commissioners appointed was persons with credible human rights records and it was due to their efforts that considerable data has been collected. However, the Government that came into power in November 2019, was openly opposed to any investigations into this matter and also refused to co-operate with the UN agencies regarding any demands for accountability relating to the conflict between the minority militant group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan military. The undermining of the OMP comes as a result of this.  (The writer is the Asian Human Rights Commission’s Policy and Programmes Director) ………………………………………… The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.


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