Since Sri Lanka’s new right-to-information law went into effect in February, a significant amount of the requests directed to the country’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) are from people looking for information about family members who had forcibly disappeared.
Data produced from an RTI request filed by the Daily News shows that of the 28 requests the commission has received so far, 12 pertained to information about missing or disappeared people.
That’s just over 40 percent of all the requests they received.
“I’m not surprised at all,” said Kumaravadivel Guruparan, a law professor at the University of Jaffna who specializes in human rights. “These families are desperately looking for their sons and daughters and husbands and wives.”
Amnesty International estimates that there have been between 60,000 and 100,000 cases of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka since the 1980s.
The majority were of young Sinhalese killed or kidnapped because of suspected leftist links in the late 1980s, or Tamils taken for alleged association with the LTTE from 1983 to 2009.
Guruparan said the RTI law may be a new avenue for people to get information about the whereabouts and fate of their lost family members.
But “it all depends on if the national security exemption is being used to deny information,” he said, referencing a part of the law that lets agencies withhold information if they determine its release “would undermine the defence of the State or its territorial integrity or national security.”
“If these authorities are serious about providing and not hiding, I think the RTI can be a way to answer (these families’) queries,” he said.
The Human Rights Commission has not rejected any of the requests pertaining to information about disappeared people, according to its RTI disclosure.
The Daily News is in the process of submitting RTI requests to see if other agencies are denying people information about enforced disappearances for national security reasons.
For its part, the Human Rights Commission closely followed the terms of the RTI law in complying with the request from the Daily News.
The commission confirmed the receipt of the request, and provided the information within the 14-day window outlined in the law. That is not always the case with government agencies since the roll-out of the law, as has been reported in this paper and in other media outlets.
The spokesman for the Human Rights Commission could not be reached by press time.
Last month, the government took a step toward addressing the questions of the families of the disappeared.
President Maithripala Sirisena signed an act forming an Office of Missing Persons, which would serve as a primary means for families to get information about disappeared loved ones. To date, it remains unformed.