Secretariat for Coordinating Reconciliation Mechanisms under the Prime Minister’s Office has a website with an English questionnaire that is open until mid-April, 2016 for collecting opinons on transitional justice mechanisms at http://www.scrm.gov.lk/#!consultations/cjg9
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Meeting Held in Trinco to Discuss Missing Person Issue
by Colombo Gazette, March 15, 2015
The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala: FAFG) held a roundtable discussion in Trincomalee to analyze requirements for a systematic and effective process to account for those who are missing as a result of more than 25 years of conflict.
The event will be followed by a roundtable in Colombo on Thursday. This is part of an initiative organized by a consortium of agencies operating as part of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICSC). The Roundtables are co-hosted by the Centre for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (CPPHR) in Trincomalee and the Centre for Human Rights Development (CHRD) in Colombo.
In November, ICMP and FAFG conducted a series of consultations in Sri Lanka with families of victims, victims’ and survivors’ associations, religious leaders, civil society organizations, government representatives, human rights advocates, lawyers, and forensic experts.
The roundtables being held this week are designed to prioritize and explore in more detail issues that were raised in November.
These include an examination of the overall objectives of the missing persons process in Sri Lanka, including the need to establish a clear and accurate estimate of the total number of missing; the obligations and responsibilities of the state, reflected in the proposal for an Office on Missing Persons; the role of other State agencies, including the judiciary; policy and legal requirements in respect of victims’ and survivors’ ability to access their rights, including access to financial support, participation in missing persons processes and protections that are available, including privacy and data protection; technical capacity requirements, including access to official and other records, and data processing requirements, as well as processes for the location and identification of remains; and capacity building for civil society, including effective advocacy and monitoring capacities, as well as inter-communal confidence building and mutual support, such as steps to prevent intimidation of victims, or address perceptions of intimidation.
ICMP is an international organization whose mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating and identifying missing persons from conflict, migration, human rights abuses, disasters, crime and other causes.
ICMP is participating in a consortium of organizations called the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation (GITJR) led by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICSC) and supported by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy Human Right and Labor (DRL).
The consortium aims to address new challenges in countries in conflict or transition struggling with legacies of or ongoing gross human rights abuses.
In Sri Lanka, consortium members ICSC, ICMP and FAFG are working together to address reconciliation and accountability needs, especially related to missing persons, through local and high-level consultations, participatory needs assessments and a technical fund to provide targeted transitional justice technical assistance to the government of Sri Lanka. (Colombo Gazette)