UN Group to assist probes into disappearances in SL

5 November 2015 09:59 pm

A team from the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) headed by its Vice President, Bernard Duhaime, will arrive in the Island next Monday (9) for a 10-day-visit to facilitate investigations into issues related to disappearances, the Foreign Ministry said.

The mandate of the WGEID was to create a platform between the families of missing persons and the government to address and resolve the issues faced by them and to observe measures taken by governments to prevent future incidents of disappearances.

Addressing a news briefing held at the Ministry, its Spokesperson Mahishini Colonne said the five member WGEID team was due to visit Sri Lanka on an invitation extended to it by the previous government in January, 2013.

“The WGEID only visits countries following invitations by their governments. Its representatives had visited Sri Lanka thrice previously, in 1991, 1992 and 1999. It had, so far, submitted 12,341 cases on enforced or involuntary disappearances to the government and the government had clarified and solved 6,590 of them. Most of the unresolved cases, about 4057, had taken place in the 1980s and 1990s,” she said. (Lahiru Pothmulla)