MUMBAI, India—Detailing “horrific levels” of violence and likely crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka’s long civil war, the United Nations’s human-rights commissioner called on Wednesday for a hybrid court with international prosecutors and judges to investigate and punish perpetrators.
The recommendations came as the UN human-rights body released a long-awaited, 251-page report into the 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009 with tens of thousands dead.
The UN report, the product of more than six years of investigation, did not name individual perpetrators but found “broad patterns” of organization and planning that indicated international laws of war were violated, particularly by government forces but also by ethnic Tamil rebels who fought for decades to establish an independent homeland in the north of the island-nation.
In omitting names, the report spared former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose government has been widely blamed for carrying out mass atrocities against mainly Tamil civilians as it crushed the rebellion in 2009.
As was widely expected, the UN human-rights commissioner, Zeid Raad Hussein, called for international involvement in punishing perpetrators, in the form of a hybrid court that would also include Sri Lankan judges, prosecutors and investigators.
Hussein said previous efforts by Sri Lankan authorities to investigate alleged war crimes, mainly under Rajapaksa’s government, lacked seriousness and were not seen as independent.
“It is, I believe, an inescapable reality that Sri Lanka’s criminal justice system is not yet ready to handle these types of crimes,” Hussein said in a news conference in Geneva.
“A purely domestic court procedure will simply not succeed in overcoming the widespread and justifiable suspicions fueled by decades of violence, malpractice and broken promises.”
Human-rights groups and Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority hailed the release of the report, but Sri Lanka’s new government, which replaced Rajapaksa’s administration in January, has steadfastly rejected any international inquiry into the conflict.
Earlier this week, the Sri Lankan government detailed its plans for a domestic process, saying it would form a truth and reconciliation commission and special offices dedicated to reparations for war victims and claims of thousands of missing persons, many believed to have been abducted by government forces.
The truth commission would seek input from South Africa, which set up such a commission in the 1990s to investigate apartheid-era abuses, while the missing persons office would be set up with “expertise” from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera told a meeting of the UN human-rights council.
“Today we have a government in place which acknowledges the suffering of victims across Sri Lanka’s communities, a government which recognizes the mistakes of the past and is all too aware of the weaknesses of our institutions,” Samaraweera said.
Sri Lanka’s new government views any internationally led inquiry as a breach of its sovereignty and is wary of being portrayed as weak by its political rivals, mainly Rajapaksa, who recently won election to a parliamentary seat and retains significant support among the ethnic Sinhala majority.
The government received a boost from the Obama administration last month when Assistant Secretary of State Nisha Desai Biswal said in a visit to Colombo, “We fundamentally support efforts to create a credible domestic process for accountability and reconciliation.”
The statement reflected U.S. eagerness to support the new government, which has sought to repair relations with the U.S., India and other allies who were alienated by the previous government’s tilt toward China.
The Obama administration pushed for the U.N. report, originally due to be released in April, to be delayed by six months in order to give Sirisena’s government space to begin reforms.
Since unseating Rajapaksa in a surprise election result in January, President Maithripala Sirisena has also made strides in reconciling with the Tamil minority, including by naming a longtime Tamil politician as the leader of the political opposition after parliamentary elections last month.
But analysts said the government’s plans for a domestic accountability mechanism still lacked specifics, including how investigations and prosecutions would be conducted, and what role the U.N. and other international experts might play.
“With such deeply institutionalized impunity, and ongoing violations and pressure on witnesses even now, no domestic process can be credible without a substantial international component,” said Alan Keenan, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.
Image credits: Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP
1 comment
human rights committee for sri Lanka? how bout committee to check what is happening in Saudi Arabia, the weekly flogging, beheading and now soon to be crucifixion of al-Nimr? How bout in china or Iran and syria?
Oh i forgot, what’s happening in Saudi, Syria, Iran et.al are permissible in the GENEVA convention and in the United Nation’s HR committee…. sorreeee, i forgot that the UNCHR and Geneva allows the stoning of women in Islamic countries who were raped, the beheading and flogging of tortured people for crimes they supposedly committed and for women who wore their hijab the wrong way……………………………………………….. oh my UNHRC………………………..