Missing Persons Commission says over 3,000 duplicated complaints

By Shanika Sriyananda

The Presidential Commission Investigating Cases of Missing Persons (PCICMP) is now sorting out over 19,000 complaints on missing loved ones received from civilians since 1980 in order to identify the duplicated complaints.

The PCICMP, which was established by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, has now been terminated and was instructed by the Government to hand over all its files of investigations to the proposed Office of Missing Persons.

However, PCICMP Chairman retired High Court Judge Maxwell Paranagama said that there were over 3,000 duplicates in the total number of complaints on missing persons received by the Commission.

“We are now sorting out these duplicates, otherwise it will give a miscalculation about the number of missing persons in the country,” he said, adding that the Commission had requested the Government to give them time till 30 August to complete the work, including sorting out the duplicated complaints.

He said that the PCICMP had found that the same complaints were lodged more than three times by family members living in different parts of the country.

Paranagama said that sorting out the total number of complaints on missing persons was a time-consuming task but they had to do it to give a correct number of missing persons since 1980.

Following the termination of the PCICMP, the Commission has stopped the scheduled public hearings.

The Chairman said that the PCICMP had heard one side of the complaints so far and the new Office on Missing Persons would obtain the testimonies of the responsible officers from the Tri-Forces, Police and the other administrative officers to have a balanced final report on missing persons.

“We have accepted only the testimony from family members of the missing persons,” he said.

At the Human Rights Council session held in Geneva in 2015, the Government agreed to establish a new Office of Missing Persons, which is one of four transitional justice mechanisms to probe cases of thousands of people who were forcibly disappeared in the country since 1980s till 2009. This includes those who disappeared during the last months of the war between the Government and the LTTE.