Damning judgment by People’s Tribunal on Murder of Journalists

The People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists presented its verdict this week declaring that the governments of Mexico, Sri Lanka and Syria are guilty of all human rights violations brought against them. The indictment alleges the Government’s complicity in failing to protect Lasantha Wickrematunge. The Government was invited to exercise its right of defence during the hearing. 

The People’s Tribunal in The Hague was co-sponsored by the Committee to Protect Journalists and it featured staged trials with real witnesses, experts, prosecutors, and esteemed judges to draw attention to journalist killings that have eluded justice.

The Tribunal heard the case of the murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge in 2009. One of the key witnesses in the hearing was Inspector of Police Nishantha Silva who was forced to flee the country after the election of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. IP Silva who now resides in a European country gave details into how he discovered that a unit attached to the military intelligence had been instrumental in not only killing Lasantha Wickrematunge but carrying out several high-profile attacks against several media personnel. This is information that Silva and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Police had provided to courts and is publicly available. Despite these comprehensive investigations and 13 years since the murder of Wickrematunge not a single person has been held accountable for the crime.

The killing of Wickrematunge in broad daylight shocked the nation, because he was a well-known critic of the then ruling regime. The People’s Tribunal in The Hague is yet again a reminder of the failure of the Sri Lanka judiciary which is unable to deliver justice even for such an emblematic case. Wickrematunge was not the first journalist to be killed in the line of duty in Sri Lanka. At least 20 journalists, predominantly Tamils reporting in the formerly embattled north and east, have been killed in Sri Lanka since the 1990s. None of these murders have been resolved and their killers have never been brought to justice.

While the previous Yahapalana Government promised swift investigations and a transparent judicial process to address these murders, including that of Wickrematunge, the probes never reached a conclusion. Some progress was made when the Wickrematunge murder probe was transferred to the CID in 2015, but continuous political interference and legal manoeuvres ensured that the case never progressed in court. Former members of the Yahapalana regime are now publicly claiming that the investigations into Wickrematunge’s murder were obstructed by “political deal making” between the leaders of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe regime and the Rajapaksa family who were in opposition. The justice that is denied by the Sri Lankan judicial system is now slowly being delivered through international mechanisms. While the verdict of the People’s Tribunal in The Hague is not legally binding the evidence it has gathered can be transferred to a competent court that is willing to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction. Furthermore, the evidence presented in the trial, not only for those who were responsible for the killing but those who covered up the crime, including very high-ranking defence and police personnel are now available for other international mechanisms. They should be at the very least subjected to travel bans and asset freezes for their credible involvement in this case.

Key among these international manoeuvres is the mechanism established at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva. As the Wickrematunge case demonstrates, the Sri Lankan State and its judiciary is both incapable and unwilling to deliver justice for such crimes. It is therefore imperative that international mechanisms such as the one at the OHCHR be empowered to hold those perpetrators accountable. Only perpetrators of such heinous crimes should fear such accountability mechanisms. Those international efforts to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes should be welcomed.