It’s a mystery to a Vancouver lawyer why the website for the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry has vanished.

Neil Chantler can’t understand why this is so when the websites of two other provincially mandated inquiries into the police-related deaths of aboriginal man Frank Paul and Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, as well as the inquiry called by the federal government into the Fraser River’s disappearing sockeye, are all up and running.

Chantler was one of the lawyers who represented the families of the women in the inquiry conducted by former judge Wally Oppal. Oppal noted in his report last year, called Forsaken, that systemic bias against poor women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside resulted in blatant police failures to stop serial killer Robert Pickton.

Chantler first noticed in September that the commission of inquiry’s website was gone. He was later told by the B.C. Ministry of Justice that it was being transferred to another server.

“It’s all just very mysterious,” Chantler said in a phone interview with the Straight. “Why does it take a month to transfer a website to another server?”

He is currently co-counsel to a number of the children of the victims who are suing Pickton, the provincial government, and the City of Vancouver.

“The reason the website is important is because it’s not just the report that matters,” Chantler said. “It’s all the transcripts from the hearings, so the public has access to not only the transcripts, but the exhibits, the rulings, the participants’ applications—all of that stuff is archived on these websites.”

The Justice Ministry, which did not make a spokesperson available for an interview, informed the Straight that the website will be relaunched by either the end of October or early November.