Tens of thousands of people have been disappeared in Sri Lanka since the 1980s. A 1999 study by the United Nations found that Sri Lanka had the second highest number of disappearances in the world and that 12,000 Sri Lankans had disappeared after being detained by the Sri Lankan security forces.[1] A few years earlier the Sri Lankan government had estimated that 17,000 people had disappeared.[1] In 2003 the Red Cross stated that it had received 20,000 complaints of disappearances during the Sri Lankan Civil War of which 9,000 had been resolved but the remaining 11,000 were still being investigated.[2] Amnesty International reported in 2017 that the disappeared persons in Sri Lanka could be between 60,000 and 100,000 since the late 1980s.[3]
Human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Asian Human Rights Commission have documented many of the disappearances and attributed them to the Sri Lankan security forces, pro-government paramilitary groups and Sri Lankan Tamil militant groups.[4][5]
In 2016, the government under president Maithripala Sirisena agreed to issue a certificate of absence to relatives of over 65,000 that went missing during the civil war and the marxist uprising allowing them to temporarily manage the property and assets of missing people, to obtain provisional guardianship of their children and apply for government welfare schemes.[6] Further the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) a proposal by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was created in the same year[7][8]
In 2020, president Gotabaya Rajapaksa confirmed that the missing people from the civil war are actually dead. [9]
- ^ a b "Sri Lanka's disappeared thousands". BBC News. 28 March 1999.
- ^ "Hope for Sri Lanka's disappeared". BBC News. 19 February 2003.
- ^ "'Sri Lanka: Refusing to Disappear'" (PDF). Amnesty International.
- ^ "ASA 37/024/1997 Government's response to widespread "disappearances" in Jaffna". Amnesty International. 27 November 1997. Archived from the original on 9 August 2009.
- ^ "Sri Lanka: 'Disappearances' by Security Forces a National Crisis". Human Rights Watch. 6 March 2008.
- ^ "Sri Lanka admits 65,000 missing from war, insurrection". Reuters India. Archived from the original on 8 June 2016. Retrieved 11 June 2016.
- ^ "Office on Missing Persons is to seek the truth: Prime Minister". www.ft.lk. Retrieved 10 September 2016.
- ^ "Sri Lanka's Proposed Office of Missing Persons: Mandate and Powers | Sri Lanka Brief". srilankabrief.org. Retrieved 10 September 2016.
- ^ Srinivasan, Meera (20 January 2020). "Sri Lanka civil war: Missing persons are dead, says Gotabaya". The Hindu. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 10 August 2021.