A new report by the International Truth and Justice Project has documented how Sri Lanka’s Office on Missing Persons has failed to deliver truth, accountability or meaningful redress, warning that the body has become part of an “architecture of denial”.
The report, titled Architecture of Denial: Sri Lanka’s Office on Missing Persons, was published in July 2026 and examines the performance of the OMP nearly a decade after it was mandated under the government of Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe. The OMP was established as Sri Lanka’s first permanent disappearance commission and was initially presented as part of a wider transitional justice framework following Colombo’s co-sponsorship of United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 30/1 in 2015.
That framework included promises of criminal accountability, institutional reform, guarantees of non-recurrence and a special hybrid court. Those commitments were later abandoned by the Sri Lankan state, leaving the OMP detached from any credible accountability process.
According to the ITJP, the result is an institution that has shifted away from investigating enforced disappearances and towards administratively managing them.
The report argues that truth-seeking without accountability risks deepening the suffering of victims, particularly where families are asked to repeatedly engage with state institutions that have failed to identify perpetrators or reveal the fate of the disappeared.
For Tamil families in the North-East, the findings echo what they have said for years: that the OMP has not delivered answers, has not won their trust and cannot substitute for an international accountability mechanism.
The OMP has yet to find a single forcibly disappeared Tamil, identify a single perpetrator or account for a single crime, despite being repeatedly defended by successive Sri Lankan governments as evidence of domestic accountability.
Missing persons or enforced disappearances?
One of the central criticisms in the report is that the OMP fails to adequately distinguish between people who are missing and victims of enforced disappearance.
A missing person may be the subject of a humanitarian search. An enforced disappearance is a continuing violation of international law, often involving state custody, denial, concealment and the refusal to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the victim. When enforced disappearances are committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population, they may amount to crimes against humanity.
The ITJP argues that by blurring these categories, the OMP obscures questions of state responsibility, command responsibility, criminal liability and the right of families to justice and remedy.
This is particularly significant for Tamils who surrendered to, or were handed over to, the Sri Lankan military in the final days of the armed conflict in May 2009. Large numbers of Tamils were last seen alive in state custody between 16 and 19 May 2009. Families have testified for years that their loved ones were taken away by the military on assurances that they would be screened and returned.
The report says the OMP’s organisation of data by where victims or family members came from, rather than where they disappeared, obscures patterns that could help establish responsibility. That means disappearances linked to specific sites, military units, surrenders or detention routes are not made visible in a way that would assist truth recovery or accountability.
A mandate ignored
The report also accuses the OMP of failing to properly use the vast body of information already gathered by previous state commissions, government departments and official inquiries.
The OMP’s own mandate requires it to collate data obtained by previous institutions, commissions of inquiry, government departments and other processes, and centralise that information in a database. Instead, the ITJP says the OMP appears to have effectively started again, placing the burden back on families to submit fresh complaints, often decades after the disappearances took place.
For families who have already testified before multiple commissions, police units, government officials and international actors, this can be re-traumatising. The report argues that requiring families to repeatedly submit the same information to successive institutions risks turning truth-seeking into another form of institutional harm.
The failure is not limited to Tamil cases.
The ITJP points to earlier Presidential Commissions into disappearances during the late 1980s JVP period, when thousands of mostly Sinhala victims were disappeared. Those commissions produced official lists of disappeared persons based on extensive interviews and verification processes. A United Nations report previously stated that three zonal commissions concluded approximately 16,800 people had disappeared, while an All-Island Commission confirmed an additional 10,400 disappearances.
The ITJP says the combined 27,200 cases investigated by earlier state bodies alone would exceed the OMP’s publicly visible case numbers. The report further states that the ITJP extracted 15,053 names from two of the earlier commissions’ published booklets, and points to thousands more names from other state processes that appear not to have been integrated into the OMP’s public lists.
According to the ITJP, its review of earlier state processes points to 29,595 names, with an additional 8,446 cases that may also remain available through earlier official records.
Archives under seal
The report also raises serious concerns over evidence held by the National Archives.
It states that testimony collected by earlier disappearance commissions remains under a secrecy order until 2030. At a public discussion in June 2026, according to the report, the Director-General of the National Archives confirmed that the testimony remains intact, that the OMP had accessed it in 2019, but that current OMP members had not sought renewed access. That material reportedly includes witness statements, investigative findings and information concerning alleged perpetrators.
The ITJP notes that UN reporting from earlier inquiries indicated alleged perpetrators were identified in at least 1,681 cases investigated by the zonal commissions. The report also points to a separate Police Department unit and an Attorney General’s Department unit that had been tasked in the late 1990s with pursuing criminal investigations and considering prosecutions in disappearance cases.
It states that criminal proceedings were instituted against 597 security force personnel in magistrates’ courts and high courts.
Even though the OMP is not a prosecutorial body, the ITJP argues that it could still have examined those records, reported publicly on the status of the cases, assessed whether any truth was established and informed families what steps the state had taken.
Instead, the report says families were asked again for information that the state may already hold, while potentially valuable evidence remained unused.
Numbers that do not add up
The report’s most striking findings concern the OMP’s own data.
The ITJP says it extracted 10,988 names from the lists currently published on the OMP website. But the Ministry of Justice publicly stated in January 2026 that there were 16,966 active complaints. The same number had reportedly been given to the United Nations in October 2025.
That leaves a discrepancy of around 6,000 cases between the Ministry figure and the OMP’s published lists.
The report says the Ministry of Justice statement containing the 16,966 figure was later removed from the website, and that the current Ministry data now shows a total caseload 1,978 cases smaller than what had been reported earlier in the year.
There is no public explanation for that reduction. If the cases had been removed because they were duplicates, military missing in action cases or outside the OMP’s mandate, the report argues that they should appear in the excluded case figures. Those excluded figures, however, appear unchanged.
The report also questions why the lists available online appear to reflect data published in 2020, even though the OMP has continued to receive complaints and operate for years since then.
Unexplained reductions, inconsistencies and missing names can deepen families’ anguish, particularly when relatives discover that emblematic cases are absent from official lists because they did not re-submit information to the OMP.
The OMP’s response
The ITJP says it sent an advance copy of the report to the OMP and the Ministry of Justice in June 2026 and invited comments before publication.
The Ministry of Justice did not respond.
The OMP submitted a covering letter and detailed observations, parts of which are reproduced and addressed in the report. According to the ITJP, the OMP said it had focused on building a centralised database, had created a temporary database, was updating and cleaning its internal data, and was transitioning to a permanent database. The OMP also said it had reached out to state agencies, developed collaborations with up to 18 institutions, and signed memorandums of understanding to compare data and obtain information. Those agencies include the Department of National Archives, with the OMP referring to a planned digitisation and archiving project for past commission records.
The ITJP welcomes some of these administrative steps but says they do not resolve the central concerns.
The permanent database remains incomplete, the revised consolidated list has not yet been published, and major discrepancies continue between figures reported by different state bodies and international mechanisms. Most importantly, the OMP’s response does not explain why key historical records already held by previous commissions and the National Archives were not systematically integrated earlier.
Conflicts of interest
The report also examines the credibility of appointments to the OMP, arguing that the body has been undermined by the inclusion of individuals closely associated with state institutions allegedly implicated in disappearances and related abuses.
It points to Major General Mohanthi Peiris, who was one of the first commissioners appointed in 2018. According to the report, Peiris had been the Sri Lankan Army’s chief legal officer from 2007 to 2010, the period when many Tamil victims disappeared in army custody. The ITJP argues that this placed her in the position of being both a potential witness and an investigator, raising serious concerns over independence and impartiality.
The report also highlights the appointment of Justice Upali Abeyrathne as OMP chairman after the change of government in 2019. Abeyrathne had chaired the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Political Victimisation, which was criticised by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for undermining police investigations and court proceedings in high-profile human rights and corruption cases.
The ITJP further raises concerns over the appointment of former police chief H. A. J. S. K. Wickramaratne, who headed the police during the final phase of the armed conflict, when enforced disappearances occurred.
For families of the disappeared, these appointments reinforced the belief that the same state structures implicated in disappearances were being allowed to shape, oversee or influence the mechanism supposedly tasked with uncovering the truth.
Death certificates and closure without truth
The report also warns that families have faced pressure to accept death certificates in the absence of truth, investigation or accountability.
Tamil families of the disappeared have repeatedly said they are not seeking compensation, jobs or death certificates, but the truth about what happened to their loved ones and justice for those responsible. Across the Tamil homeland, families have maintained roadside protests since 2017, first in Kilinochchi and then across Vavuniya, Trincomalee, Mullaitivu and elsewhere. More than 400 mothers and fathers of the disappeared have died during the long struggle without learning the fate of their children.
The families have consistently rejected Sri Lanka’s domestic mechanisms, including the OMP, and called instead for an international investigation.
The emergence of mass graves, including at Chemmani, has only sharpened those demands.
Families have warned that the Sri Lankan state is attempting to replace truth with paperwork, money and bureaucratic closure, while the structures responsible for disappearances remain untouched.