Architecture of Denial
by International Truth & Justice Project, Sri Lanka, South Africa, July 16, 2026
ITJP ENG_ARCHITECTURE-OF-DENIAL-SRI-LANKA-S-OFFICE-ON-MISSING-PERSONS
Summary
Sri Lanka’s first permanent disappearance commission, the Office on Missing
Persons (OMP), mandated in August 2016,1 has spectacularly failed to deliver
truth, accountability or meaningful redress over the last decade.
The OMP in Sri Lanka has been hampered by chronic political interference,
inadequate resources, institutional weaknesses raising profound mistrust among
affected families. “Many see it as another symbolic gesture rather than a
functioning institution of accountability”.2
The OMP was conceived as only one component of a broader transitional justice
framework that included commitments to criminal accountability, institutional
reform, and guarantees of non-recurrence, including a Special Hybrid court. The
Government abandoned those commitments soon after co-sponsoring Human Rights
Council Resolution 30/1 in 2015. As a result, the OMP became detached from any
credible accountability framework and evolved into an institution primarily
concerned with “managing” disappearances, rather than investigating them, or
securing truth, justice and accountability for victims.
Sri Lanka’s experience demonstrates the limitations of pursuing truth-seeking in
the absence of accountability. Institutions established without independence,
prosecutorial pathways, political will or institutional integrity, risk becoming
mechanisms for managing violations rather than addressing them.
Rather than advancing truth recovery and justice, they can deepen victims’
suffering by creating the appearance of progress while leaving impunity intact
because:
• Truth without accountability risks becoming another form of abandonment;
• Reparations without acknowledgment become another form of denial;
• Reconciliation presupposes acknowledgement, accountability and
institutional reform; where impunity persists, genuine reconciliation
remains unattainable.
Where perpetrators remain protected and victims remain without answers,
rehabilitation and reconciliation is impossible and inherently unjust. When
disappearance mechanisms are severed from justice, institutional reform, and
guarantees of non-recurrence, they risk becoming part of the very architecture
of erasure they were created to dismantle.
1 https://www.omp.gov.lk/about/establishment-of-the-commission
2 https://groundviews.org/2025/09/02/the-unending-suffering-of-the-forcibly-disappeared/?utm_source=chatgpt.com