Rights activists made this appeal at a discussion organised by the Law and Society Trust to commemorate the International Day of the Disappeared.

“Enforced disappearances are not even classified as a crime under the Sri Lankan law so it is impossible to take appropriate legal action,” Shantha Pathirana of the Association of Family Members of the Disappeared (AFMD) said.

According to Mr. Pathirana, ratifying the UN convention would symbolise the government’s commitment to protecting the lives of its citizens and oblige the state to bring abductors to justice, thereby ending the prevalent culture of impunity.

Mr. Pathirana said the international convention which was adopted by the

UN General Assembly in December last year would establish an international committee of independent experts to monitor compliance by the ratifying state. These experts will review reports by countries and can also receive individual complaints.

“By criminalising enforced disappearances and establishing an independent group of people to monitor the situation, the convention will help protect the lives of Sri Lankans. It is therefore relevant to our country,” Mr. Pathirana said.

The AFMD representative also said the incumbent president had been detained at the Katunayake airport in 1990 for trying to take documents containing information on the disappeared to the UN in Geneva.

“Today, we are under flak for engaging in foreign lobbying and it is sad that we have to remind the President that it was he who initiated international lobbying to counter domestic Human Rights violations,” Mr. Pathirana said.

Rukshan Fernando, the Coordinator of the Human Rights in Conflict Programme said the annual commemoration day (August 30) which was initiated by FEDEFAM, an organisation of family members of disappeared in Latin America, was today marked all over the world.

Mr. Morgan of the Association of Family Members of the Disappeared in Jaffna, the country’s worst affected district, said enforced disappearances had resulted in a great loss to the country. Pointing out that abductions were a daily experience in Jaffna, he said the alarming phenomenon had reduced the peninsula to an extremely sorry state.

“The law is something that we don’t have in Jaffna; we have no ownership of anything and the right to life is not guaranteed. Moreover, security has not been provided to the people of Jaffna by those who have taken up arms. What is happening to us shouldn’t happen to anyone living in any part of the world,” he said.

“When we know that a particular community is subjected to enforced disappearances, we shouldn’t pretend to be deaf,” he said making an appeal to the Sinhala community in the South to express solidarity with the Tamils in the North and join in the struggle to ensure justice for all Sri Lankans.

Another AFMD representative Vasantha Ranil Kumara said a Presidential Commission appointed in 1998 had made 25 recommendations but only two of them had been implemented and that too partially.

Mr. Kumara also said only 17,000 people were paid compensation although there were 28,000 appeals. The payment made in the scales of Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 50,000 was in no way sufficient to facilitate rehabilitation and furthermore, there was discrimination in awarding compensation, he alleged.

“While the family members of slain ministers are paid huge amounts as compensation, the rest are paid insignificant monetary payments,” Mr. Kumara charged.

There are 5,749 outstanding cases of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka. They are now being reviewed by the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances. Since 2006, hundreds of people have been reportedly abducted in the North-East and Colombo by either the LTTE or the Karuna group, allegedly alongside the security forces.

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