Sri Lanka’s two major waves of disappearance ran on parallel but distinct tracks.

In the south, the Southern and Central Commissions dealt with disappearances from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s (JVP) second insurrection (1987–’89), when the State crushed the uprising through widespread extrajudicial killing. Perpetrators were identified in 1,681 of the complaints investigated – including 27 MPs, 20 Police superintendents, and 12 Army captains – though identification rarely led to indictment.

In Tamil-speaking regions, a comparable pattern ran from the 1970s through to the end of the war in 2009: young men taken during military ‘clearing’ operations or round-ups; people taken from Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps after surrendering or screening; disappearances linked to paramilitary groups backed by State forces, particularly in the east; and journalists and civil society figures who vanished after criticising the Government or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The North East Zonal Commission’s Final Report ascribed 90% of enforced disappearances in that region to the military and Police, and 10% to paramilitary groups such as the LTTE.

Both patterns point to the same conclusion: eligibility for the pathway proposed later has to be victim-based, since the same institutional pattern – round-up, secret detention, no record – recurs regardless of region or which actor was responsible.

The scale of the problem

The United Nations (UN) Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has transmitted over 12,000 cases since 1980, with roughly 6,000 outstanding – a tally excluding 1971, since the mechanism did not yet exist.

Sri Lanka’s own commissions produced larger, mutually inconsistent counts: 20,000–27,000 disappearances documented in the 1980s–’90s alone, of which fewer than 500 suspected perpetrators were indicted. No version has been reconciled into one official count spanning 1971 to 2009.

How disappearance becomes possible

Disappearance is rarely a single lawless act. Armed conflict provides cover to ‘disappear’ perceived enemies, and a culture of impunity – no prosecutions, no cost – deepens it. Emergency law formalises the space: constitutions typically allow suspension of habeas corpus, and its absence is decisive, since without it secret detention easily becomes disappearance.

Preventive detention and vague language (‘threat to national security’) extend this further, leaving no paper trail. Core rights – life, freedom from torture, recognition before the law – remain non-derogable under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) even during emergencies.

A related gap concerns non-state actors: the UN convention requires state involvement or acquiescence, so an independent non-state group’s disappearance technically falls outside its strict scope, although Article 3 still requires states to investigate. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) binds non-state armed groups directly, so rebel abductions can be prosecuted as war crimes independent of state involvement – the backdrop to the LTTE- and JVP-linked cases below.

SL’s mechanisms: Documentation without enforcement

Sri Lanka’s nine commissions of inquiry since 1991 share a structural flaw: fact-finding bodies with no judicial power, reporting to the president ‘on a balance of probabilities,’ with action left to presidential discretion – investigation without enforcement, which is why they produced abundant documentation but almost no accountability.

The Office on Missing Persons (2018) and the Certificate of Absence (2016) mark a real departure – death certificate-equivalent rights without a declaration of death – though banks have repeatedly refused to honour it in practice, and an older instrument, the Certificate of Death, should stay legally distinct, with conversion remaining voluntary.

This flaw is not unique to Sri Lanka: disappearance tends to emerge through a consistent sequence – emergency powers escalating into shadow detention, deniable chains of command, non-enforcement of habeas corpus – until it becomes a response the legal system has learnt to tolerate.

Non-recurrence guarantees must target these conditions directly. The LTTE’s abductions, often followed by summary executions, have been treated by the UN Working Group as tantamount to enforced disappearance, though its caseload is comparatively small next to the State’s, which is why eligibility has to be victim-based rather than perpetrator-based.

Who is left behind, and what they seek

International law treats every family member as a victim in their own right – spouses, children (including those born in captivity or raised under false identities), parents, siblings, and communities.

What families seek goes beyond compensation: truth about fate and remains, active search, a legal status reflecting disappearance rather than a forced death declaration, restored identity for abducted children, and practical relief such as inheritance without a death certificate. This is ambiguous loss – grief without a confirming event – and as original searchers age or die, the search passes to their children as a form of coping.

Compensation-only mechanisms routinely under-deliver on what families rank highest – truth and an active search – because those are harder for a bureaucracy to close out with a single payment.

Lessons from elsewhere

Argentina’s ‘absence by forced disappearance’ framework unlocks inheritance and pension rights without asserting death, and has run identity restitution for children raised under false identities for nearly four decades. The Inter-American Court’s Velásquez Rodríguez vs. Honduras (1988) established disappearance as a continuing violation and shifted the burden of proof to the State where it controlled the detention site.

Chile’s Rettig and Valech Commissions moved beyond one-off payments to an ongoing pension and health programme, and Bosnia’s 2004 Law on Missing Persons, paired with DNA-led identification, has produced roughly 13,000 identifications out of an estimated 30,000 missing. The common thread: legal status and search obligations attach automatically once reported, rather than waiting on a family to prove death case by case.

Memorialisation matters alongside this, but not as a substitute for truth; remembrance without an effort to establish what happened can read as the state closing the book rather than opening it.

Gold-standard practice combines site-based memorials (Argentina’s ESMA, Chile’s Villa Grimaldi) with living institutions that fuse memorialisation with ongoing identification; Sri Lanka already has domestic models to formalise, including a joint Buddhist-Catholic commemoration in Raddoluwa held annually since 1991.

Missing in action, and who else belongs in the register

Sri Lanka’s National War Heroes’ Day memorialises only the confirmed dead of its security forces; folding ‘missing’ into ‘killed’ reproduces the same problem of premature closure that this pathway is intended to avoid for civilians.

The same logic extends to LTTE combatants never recovered; international precedent, from the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s (DPAA) continuing WW II search to Finland’s DNA-led recovery of roughly 1,000 WW II soldiers, shows sustained Missing in Action (MIA) search is normal practice.

A victim-based register is incomplete if it stops at combatants. An estimated 6,900 children were recruited by the LTTE between 2002 and 2007 – unlawful recruitment in itself. Tamil civilians and militants killed as the LTTE eliminated rival Tamil militant groups, such as the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) and Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO), between 1985 and 1987 sit awkwardly across the State/LTTE framing, since the perpetrator organisation no longer exists, and over 700 killed in JVP-linked violence in 1988 fall outside that framing entirely.

Eligibility turns on the same test: loss and lack of accounting, not which actor caused it. The two defining episodes – 1971 and 1987–’90 – carry estimates never reconciled: roughly 4,000–6,000 dead in 1971 and 20,000 recorded disappeared to a combined 40,000–60,000 dead or disappeared in 1987–’90.

Ageing survivors and accountability

Those who can identify the missing from first-hand knowledge are now elderly, making several needs time-critical: urgent DNA reference collection and trauma-informed healthcare, low-mobility bureaucracy and succession planning for case files, and symbolic closure delivered while survivors are alive, alongside converting time-limited certificates into stable, pension-like income.

Enforced disappearance is legally a continuing crime, so statutes of limitations run only from when it ceases. For ageing perpetrators, three tools matter: command-responsibility doctrine, mitigation-for-information provisions, and testimonial evidence banking before testimony is lost to death.

Recommended way forward: A state recognition pathway

What a state owes survivors is not a single remedy but a sequenced chain of obligations. This brief recommends a nine-stage pathway built on the UN’s four pillars for redressing gross human rights violations, drawn from the Updated Set of Principles to Combat Impunity (2005) and the Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation (2005).

No single act – apology, payment, or prosecution – discharges the obligation; all four dimensions must be addressed together, with search and psychosocial support running throughout.

Right to know

1. Complaint received

2. State recognition – interim legal status on a credible complaint alone

3. Truth and documentation

4. Search and investigation – active, DNA-led, independent of prosecution

Delivery: a single statutory authority must own each case and be accountable if a stage stalls, with diplomatic missions abroad as diaspora intake points.

Right to reparation

5. Legal status and relief – unlocking inheritance, custody, pensions, and banking access

6. Reparations and identity – ongoing entitlement to education, healthcare, and livelihood support

7. Memorialisation and healing – via a living institution paired with psychosocial support

Delivery: Rwanda’s FARG fund is the clearest sustained model, though its ethnicity-based eligibility should not be replicated; keep eligibility strictly victim-based.

Right to justice/non-recurrence

8. Accountability and justice – prosecution where possible, truth commissions where courts cannot reach

9. Non-recurrence – vetting, civilian oversight of detention, a public registry, and whistleblower protection.

Delivery: following Colombia’s Unidad para las Víctimas, the authority should carry a sunset clause – a 10-year term the legislature can extend by vote – with services in Sinhala, Tamil, and English.

Recognition has to trigger a case-managed pathway through search, truth, reparations, and justice – reaching every family waiting to know, regardless of which side of the conflict their relative was on.

(The writer served on the Election Commission and as a Governor. He works on rights-related issues)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)