Despite Sri Lanka's Office of Mission Persons (OMP) failure to address the issue of enforced disappearences on the island. the office has issued a job advertisement for several open positions at the office, calling on individuals to help with victim support, protection and communications.
According to the vacancy notice, applications are sought for the positions of head of protection, head of victim and family support, head of legal, policy and research, head of communications, senior protection officers, data analysts, regional coordinators, IT officers, translators, drivers and office aids. These posts according to the notice are two-year-contracts with a basic salary and all other approved allowances.
This is the first time that the OMP has put out a notice for vacancies since Anura Kumara Dissanayake became Sri Lanka's president. During Ranil Wickremesinghe's government, the OMP also sought individuals who would assist "fact-finding missions."
Earlier this year, Sri Lanka reiterated its rejection of UN resolutions on accountability for mass atrocities but admitted that thousands of forcibly disappeared remain unaccounted for despite years of failed domestic mechanisms. Speaking before the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council, Sri Lanka's representative claimed that the country was continuing to make progress through the Office on Missing Persons (OMP).
The OMP has been routinely criticised by international human rights experts and Tamil family members of the disappeared. In 2022, the UN High Commissioner highlighted that the OMP "has not been able to trace a single disappeared person or clarify the fate of the disappeared in meaningful ways".
In an interview with the The Sunday Morning, OMP Chairman Mahesh Katulanda claimed that it has managed to locate 16 forcibly disappeared individuals who were reported missing since 2000, out of approximately 6,000 inquiries they have investigated, but refused to divulge any further information.
Several thousand of the complaints that had been submitted to the OMP remain unaccounted for. Eelam Tamils in the homeland and the diaspora have rejected the OMP citing that it has failed to find their loved ones calling the institution merely an eyewash. Tamil families ohave repeatedly spoken on how they do not trust the OMP since it failed to fulfil its mandate.
