Cabinet approves establishment of Permanent Office of Missing Persons

By Dharisha Bastians 

Taking a first step towards establishing a credible transitional justice mechanism to address human rights violations during the war and help thousands of families across Sri Lanka to discover the fate of their loved ones, the Government approved the proposal for a permanent Office of Missing Persons at the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. 

The Office of Missing Persons (OMP) will be set up by legislation the Government has already drafted, as the first of four pillars of Sri Lanka’s Transitional Justice Mechanism Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera committed to before the UN Human Rights Council in September last year.  

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe requested the approval of the Cabinet of Ministers on Tuesday (23) to establish by statute, an Office of Missing Persons and publish a Government Gazette of the draft legislation and present that bill in Parliament. 

In a statement issued yesterday, Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera said: “The need to set up such an office is particularly acute as Sri Lanka has one of the largest caseloads of missing persons in the entire world – the result of uprisings in the South and the war lasting nearly three decades.”

“This Office is the first of the four mechanisms dealing with conflict-related grievances that the new Government pledged to establish and legislation will soon be presented to parliament to make that commitment a reality,” he added.

The Cabinet Memorandum presented by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, entitled ‘The Establishment of Office on Missing Persons,’ explained the problem of enforced disappearances in the country, provided justification for the setting up of the OMP and outlined the framework for the office, which is to be vested with administrative and investigative powers. 

The Prime Minister’s Cabinet paper said the Office would search for and trace missing persons and clarify the circumstances in which the persons went missing, protect the rights and interests of missing persons and their relatives and identify avenues of redress for victims of disappearance.

The Chairman and members of the OMP will be appointed by the President on the recommendation of the Constitutional Council, to ensure the independence of the Office, the Premier’s memo said. 

“The proposed OMP should have sufficient administrative and investigative powers including those granted to Commissions of Inquiry to compel the cooperation of persons and state institutions and officers in the course of its investigations,” Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s Cabinet paper said. 

The OMP will not engage in prosecutions and its findings will not give rise to civil or criminal liability, the Cabinet paper asserted. 

According to Minister Samaraweera, whose Ministry has led civil society consultations on the OMP, the newly-approved office will “ensure that measures are taken and recommendations made, so that Sri Lankans no longer have to fear being disappeared”.

He asserted that the OMP would be composed of commissioners and officers of the highest moral integrity, and have a victim and witness protection unit and will also provide victims access to administrative, legal and psychosocial support, when victims may require it.

Remarking on the OMP’s relation to previous commissions, Samaraweera said: “This Office will not duplicate the work of other Commissions. It will absorb previous records in to a centralised system, aiming to complete outstanding investigations and finally provide families with the answers that they have long sought. The OMP will work in tandem with the other post-conflict mechanisms, and along with the implementation of the convention on enforced disappearances, will prevent the re-emergence of the white van culture contributing to the safety and security of all Sri Lankans.” 

Speaking to Daily FT, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives and Attorney-at-Law Bhavani Fonseka said the move to set up the Office of Missing Persons was welcome but added that much more would be necessary to ensure the mechanism will not be a repeat of flawed commissions of inquiry appointed by successive governments to deal with disappearances. 

Fonseka said civil society remained concerned with the process of establishing such an important entity. “So far the process has been shrouded in secrecy and does not bode well for gaining the trust of victims and for future mechanisms,” she added.