President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman paid a joint visit to the Committee on Missing Persons’ laboratory in the buffer zone in Nicosia on Thursday, ahead of a tripartite meeting with United Nations envoy Maria Angela Holguin later in the day.

The pair were joined there by Holguin and the UN’s special representative Khassim Diagne, while the CMP’s three members, Turkish Cypriot Hakki Muftuzade, Greek Cypriot Leonidas Pantelides, and Pierre Gentile were all also in attendance.

The visit began at 3.15pm and was immediately followed by the start of the tripartite meeting, with Erhurman having announced that he will evaluate the day’s contacts in a press conference at 8pm.

The visit to the laboratory came as the European Union announced a donation of €2.6 million to the CMP, with the CMP writing that the money will “support the committee’s goal of identifying and returning the remains of missing individuals in 2026, bringing to an end the uncertainty which has affected the families for so many years”.

In total, the EU has donated €43.7m to the CMP since its first donation in 2007, making it the largest financial contributor to the committee.

The CMP was first established in 1981 and became operational in 2006, setting out to locate and identify a total of 2,002 people who went missing during Cyprus’ intercommunal conflicts.

As of November 30 this year, it has exhumed 1,713 bodies and identified the remains of 1,058 people from the official list, as well as 216 others.

Of those identified, 296 were Turkish Cypriots and 762 were Greek Cypriots.

So far this year, the remains of 22 people have been found, with seven of them having been identified. Six of those were Greek Cypriots and the other was a Turkish Cypriot.

The CMP operates with donations, with nation states and international organisations frequently donating to it, with Greece having donated €50,000 in October and Turkey having donated US$100,000 last month. Both countries are regular donors, though donations also come from further afield.

Portugal, for example, donated €15,000 in September, with the country’s ambassador in Nicosia Vanda Sequeira saying at the time that Portugal “considers the CMP to be an invaluable institution, bringing closure to thousands of families from both Cypriot communities who lost loved ones due to the tragic events of 1963 to 1964, and 1974”.

She added that the CMP “stands as a unique bicommunal mechanism, demonstrating that humanitarian objectives can prevail even in the most complex political circumstances”.

“The spirit of cooperation is essential in Cyprus, where building trust remains a cornerstone of reconciliation,” she said.

Former CMP third member Paul-Henri Arni said last year that Cyprus has the “second-best results in the world” in its search for missing persons.

There are 42 countries in the world in which there are missing persons from conflict or political violence, and Henri said in most of those, the success rate for finding their remains is below 20 per cent.

“Some are at zero per cent, some at one per cent. Georgia is at 16 per cent. Argentina, a very cold case, is at 20 per cent”, he said.