Enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka

[1] In 2003 the Red Cross stated that it had received 20,000 complaints of disappearances during the Sri Lankan Civil War of which 9,000 had been resolved but the remaining 11,000 were still being investigated.

[4][5] In 2016, the government under president Maithripala Sirisena agreed to issue a certificate of absence to relatives of over 65,000 that went missing during the civil war and the marxist uprising allowing them to temporarily manage the property and assets of missing people, to obtain provisional guardianship of their children and apply for government welfare schemes.

Commissions have documented how thousands of people have been kidnapped by armed men and disappeared without a trace.

[11] Many Tamil nationalists claim there was a resurgence of abductions in 2005 after the failure of Norwegian mediated peace process.

[12] The victims of the abductions were predominantly Sri Lankan Tamils living in Jaffna and Colombo.