UN Rights Council should extend crucial mandate on Sri Lanka: HRW

 

Logo of Human Rights Watch (HRW)

The United Nations Human Rights Council should adopt a resolution on Sri Lanka to enable continued UN monitoring, reporting, and evidence collection of rights violations for future prosecutions, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said today. 

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who was elected on September 21, 2024, should reverse the policies of his predecessors by cooperating with the UN’s investigation mechanism, ending the use of repressive laws to stifle dissent, and preventing security forces from targeting activists, survivors of abuses, and victims’ families with threats and reprisals, HRW said in a statement.

In his latest report the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, found that “ill-treatment by police and security forces remain prevalent.” He stated that, “long overdue reforms … have not occurred,” and “there are renewed threats to fundamental freedoms.” He described “entrenched impunity” for past crimes and found that “impunity has also manifested itself in the corruption, abuse of power, and governance failures that were among the root causes of the country’s recent economic crisis.”

“Successive Sri Lankan governments have failed to hold accountable officials implicated in horrific abuses, particularly against Tamils and Muslims, and President Dissanayake, who has pledged to end rights violations, can alter that history by ensuring justice and protecting victims and activists,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Human Rights Council resolutions are a crucial means of maintaining scrutiny on rights violations in Sri Lanka, offering some hope for justice, and a lifeline for victims who are otherwise at the mercy of abusive authorities.”

Numerous domestic and international investigation commissions, as well as United Nations human rights experts, have made recommendations for reform, which successive Sri Lankan administrations have disregarded. 

This includes addressing grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including war crimes committed by both government forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the 1983-2009 civil war, as well as during a security forces crackdown on an insurrection in 1987-1989 by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the party Dissanayake now leads.

The UN high commissioner noted in his report that the government has “rarely even acknowledged the serious violations that occurred.” Several mass graves have been accidentally discovered, but not properly investigated. Victims face “insurmountable” barriers to justice, “even in the most emblematic of cases,” and government authorities frequently disrupt events at which families attempt to commemorate victims, the statement said.

The UN found that earlier government commissions of inquiry “failed credibly to establish truth and advance accountability.” When the previous government brought a new proposal for a similar commission, victims’ groups broadly rejected it. The then foreign minister, Ali Sabry, told members of parliament on September 3 that the purpose of the commission was to “prevent foreign interference.”