By The Pulseline News Desk
Sri Lanka’s Office on Missing Persons (OMP) has consolidated thousands of duplicate complaints and established a verified database of 23,352 missing individuals, marking a significant step in efforts to address cases of enforced disappearance.
The development comes eight years after the OMP was established to investigate and clarify the fate of people reported missing during Sri Lanka’s conflicts and other periods of unrest.
OMP Chairman Mahesh Katulanda has said the office initially inherited approximately 42,000 complaints submitted to previous presidential commissions, United Nations agencies and international organisations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
However, the large volume of records did not necessarily represent the same number of missing individuals.
According to Katulanda, many families had submitted complaints to several institutions over the years in an effort to locate missing relatives. The absence of a centralised database, combined with historical manual record-keeping, had made it difficult to determine whether separate complaints referred to the same person.
The problem was further complicated by the fact that many people who went missing during earlier conflicts did not possess National Identity Cards (NICs), making it harder for authorities to accurately match and verify records.
The OMP had subsequently undertaken a detailed verification process, including direct engagement with families, to remove duplicate and multiple entries and establish a more reliable database.
Katulanda has described identifying duplicate complaints and properly verifying individual cases as one of the office’s biggest challenges.
The current database includes 16,966 active cases involving civilians, while missing military and police personnel are recorded separately.
As part of its preliminary inquiries, OMP officials have so far met 9,072 families face-to-face across the country.
The process has also moved beyond record-keeping, with the Government providing one-time interim relief payments to more than 5,700 families affected by disappearances. Recommendations have been submitted for payments to more than 2,000 additional families.
The Government has also allocated Rs. 375 million to strengthen the OMP’s outreach programmes and enable officials to engage with a larger number of families.
In a further move to accelerate investigations, the relevant ministry has authorised the recruitment of 69 additional staff members, including legal officers, tracing investigators, psychosocial support personnel and administrative staff.
The expansion is expected to increase the OMP’s capacity to investigate cases, maintain contact with families and provide assistance to those seeking information about missing relatives.
Katulanda has said the OMP plans to expand its outreach significantly by the end of this year, with a target of reaching 13,000 to 14,000 families across the country.
The OMP’s work remains particularly significant for families who have spent years seeking answers about relatives who had disappeared during periods of conflict and political violence.
Katulanda has said some families who had previously taken part in street protests to highlight their grievances are now working with the OMP in its efforts to establish what happened to their loved ones.
The OMP is also preparing to mark the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, with its main commemoration scheduled to be held in Jaffna on 25 August, followed by regional events in the Northern, Eastern and Southern provinces.
The consolidation of the database represents an important administrative step, but the more difficult task remains: turning verified records into credible investigations and, ultimately, answers for families who have waited years to know the fate of those they lost.
For the OMP, the focus now appears to be shifting from identifying and cleaning up the records to expanding investigations, tracing missing persons and strengthening engagement with families across the country.
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