Enforced Disappearances of Eelam Tamils in Sri Lanka Introduction Enforced disappearance – the state-sanctioned abduction of a person followed by refusal to acknowledge their fate – has been a devastating phenomenon in Sri Lanka for decades. The country’s 26-year armed conflicts  (1983–2009) between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) left tens of thousands of ethnic Tamils missing . Sri Lanka gained the grim distinction of having one of the highest numbers of enforced disappearances in the world , second only to Iraq. Estimates by rights organizations and the United Nations indicate at least 60,000 and as many as 100,000 people may have been forcibly disappeared since the 1980s. Most of the victims were Eelam Tamils from the North and East, who vanished during the armed conflicts’ three decades. This report examines the historical, social, and political context of these disappearances, the profound impacts on victims’ families and communitie...

Deliberate Denial of Justice for Sri Lanka’s Tamil Victims of Enforced Disappearances Sri Lanka’s Tamil Disappearances and the State’s Deliberate Obstruction of Truth Introduction The issue of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka, particularly those affecting Tamil communities during and after the country’s protracted armed conflict, persists as one of the most egregious and unresolved human rights crises in South and Southeast Asia. Despite international scrutiny, legislative reforms, and the establishment of multiple domestic mechanisms, justice and truth for the families of tens of thousands of disappeared remain consistently and deliberately denied by the Sri Lankan state. This dossier critically examines how successive governments have manipulated legal, political, and institutional frameworks to avoid accountability, with a special focus on the state’s use of reclassifying wartime disappearances as “missing persons”-an act which serves to obscure crimes of enforced disappear...