A group assembled to oversee the search into potential grave sites identified near former residential schools has refused to work with a Hague-based international organization dedicated to assisting governments with identifying missing persons and exhuming mass graves.

The National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials said yesterday that it could not trust the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) because it is “non-Indigenous.”

“While the (committee) is appreciative of a number of changes that have since been made to this agreement, we remain deeply concerned that such an important and sensitive process has been entrusted to a non-Indigenous organization with no prior history of working with residential school survivors,” a statement by the committee reads.

First established in 1996 at a G7 summit, the ICMP’s first mission was to investigate missing people in the wake of the Yugoslav Wars. As of 2001, the group has developed a DNA identification system for missing persons as well as a world-recognized specialized missing persons database.