Counting the Missing: Sri Lanka Faces First UN Review on Enforced Disappearances

 

This afternoon in Geneva, Sri Lanka stood before the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) for the first time. At issue: what the country has — and hasn’t — done to confront one of its most haunting legacies.

Leading the delegation was Minister of Justice and National Integration Harshana Nanayakkara, flanked by an entourage of senior officials: from Defence to Women and Child Affairs, the Attorney-General’s Department, the Foreign Ministry, Police, the Office on Missing Persons, Office for Reparations, ONUR, and Sri Lanka’s Geneva Mission.

The setting is hybrid — part in person, part virtual — but the questions are not. Geneva wants to know whether Sri Lanka has delivered on the promises it made when it signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance in 2015 and ratified it in 2016.

It took until 23 August 2023 for Sri Lanka to file its initial report — outlining legal and institutional measures to comply. But today’s review isn’t about paperwork. It is about accountability: how many of the disappeared have been traced, how many cases prosecuted, how many families compensated, and whether “never again” has become more than a slogan.

The session sits uncomfortably against Sri Lanka’s backdrop:

Tens of thousands still missing from the war years.

Families of the disappeared still holding vigils, photographs clutched to their chests.

Scepticism over the effectiveness of the Office on Missing Persons and the Office for Reparations.

Concerns that promises made in Geneva rarely echo in Colombo.

Sri Lanka is not alone in the hot seat. Montenegro and Benin are also under review during this 29th session, which runs until 2 October 2025. But the stakes feel heavier for a country where enforced disappearances are not history, but living memory.

As the Sri Lankan team fields questions in Geneva, the phrase “counting the missing” lingers. For many families, the real review is not in the UN’s hybrid chambers — it is in their homes, where an empty chair still sits at the table.