COLOMBO: Sri Lanka is to establish an office of missing persons to deal with the high number of cases of missing persons connected in particular with the 30-year-old civil war with the Tamil Tiger rebels that ended in 2009.

Sri Lankan Minister of Foreign Affairs Mangala Samaraweera said here on Wednesday that owing to the country having the largest caseloads of missing persons in the world, the cabinet had granted approval for the setting up of the office to work in tandem with the other post-conflict mechanisms.

“This is the first of the four mechanisms dealing with conflict-related grievances that the new government has pledged to establish,” he said stating that the primary mandate of the office would be to locate thousands of persons across the country and find out the circumstances under which they went missing.

The office is to have a victim and witness protection unit and provide victims access to administrative, legal and psycho-social support and is to absorb previous records of missing persons into a centralised system.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2016