Fixing the OMP

Last week the Parliament announced that applications have been called for to fill the vacancies for the posts of members in the Office on Missing Persons. The OMP established in 2016 is arguably the most potent institution that is available to address the outstanding issue of enforced disappearances and those missing in numerous conflicts. However, it is also one of the greatest abysmal failures in delivering justice and remedy for victims. As new applications are called to fill vacancies in this organisation there is a new opportunity to reinvigorate the OMP.

The OMP has a mandate to search for and trace missing persons with broad legal powers of investigation. As a recent UN report noted, the OMP has instead focused on ‘assessing victim families’ entitlement to financial assistance, reducing ‘duplicate entries’ in their database and closure of files.’ According to this report, the OMP, has thus far determined the fate of 16 missing persons. Despite the discovery of over 20 mass graves, the identity of a single victim has yet to be identified offering some closure to victims.

Missing persons are a larger group than those subjected to enforced disappearance. The missing include combatants and civilians that are recorded as missing at the end of a conflict situation. In Sri Lanka these include over 5,000 military personnel who are registered as missing in action (MIA). Enforced disappearance is a more specific crime committed mostly by State actors but in the case of Sri Lanka by the LTTE and other non-State actors as well.

The magnitude of enforced disappearances is unprecedented in Sri Lanka. The country has the world’s second-highest number of cases registered with the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. The Government’s own commissions of inquiry have registered over 46,000 disappearances in the south during the period 1987-89 and 23,000 in the north and east. At least 12,000 were subjected to enforced disappearance or were extra judiciary killed in 1971. According to international law as long as a person remains missing the crime of enforced disappearance is ongoing. In 2016 Sri Lanka acceded to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and ratified it through legislation in 2018. Yet to this date this Act has not been used to prosecute anyone.

The OMP was established with much hope to address the outstanding case load of over 100,000 missing persons. Despite its promising start with respected lawyer Saliya Peiris as Chair and other equally able commissioners, the institution spent most of its initial years working on its legal framework rather than enhancing forensics and investigation capacity. As a result it has not been able to deliver the expected results and its credibility has rapidly deteriorated. A low point was when President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed a one-time Inspector General of Police as a commissioner to the OMP who himself is accused of involvement in the disappearance of two Tamil civilians as part of the cover up of the Lasantha Wickrematunge murder.

With the appointment of a new group of commissioners there is some hope of a revival. The OMP has the mandate and the ability to provide justice to one of Sri Lanka’s most heinous crimes, enforced disappearance. As the current administration has promised in Geneva that it will be seeking justice to past crimes through a domestic mechanism, it is time to demonstrate that commitment. The best place to start would be to empower the OMP and to make it an effective institution to find missing persons, either dead or alive, and to investigate the circumstances of their fate.