Empty rhetoric at HRC 51

“I say to the sceptics: don’t judge us by the broken promises, experiences and U-turns of the past. Let us design, define and create our future by our hopes and aspirations, and not be held back by the fears and prejudices of the past. Let us not be afraid to dream,” Mangala Samaraweera in Geneva, 2015.

Sri Lanka failed once again at the Human Rights Council yesterday, this time failing to deliver any tangible actions to address its appalling human rights record and ease calls for international jurisdiction and accountability mechanisms. 

There were speculations of a possible announcement of the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), that would have at least addressed some of the outstanding concerns. There was no such announcement.

Addressing the 51st session of the HRC, Foreign Minister Ali Sabry stated that “reconciliation and accountability are being comprehensively addressed through a domestic process” without articulating what this domestic process is since there had not been any movement in this regard since November 2019.

At the end of the current Human Rights Council session, a new resolution is expected to be presented to the Council that would extend the mandate of the office established under the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to gather evidence of violations in Sri Lanka.

By co-sponsoring a resolution in 2015, Sri Lanka changed the trajectory of international actions that was building for years under the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration. It had lost vote after vote at the HRC from 2012-2014, and the situation was hurtling towards a Special Commission of Inquiry on war crimes. Then Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera managed to pull the situation back from the brink, with firm commitments to address rights violations and deal with Sri Lanka’s difficult past.

In 2015, Samaraweera presented a blueprint for Transitional Justice, including a TRC, an Office of Missing Persons, an Office for Reparations, and a special prosecutor to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice. The Government of Gotabaya Rajapaksa withdrew the co-sponsorship to 30/1 in 2020, an act that had zero basis in law but made for good media drama. As a result, the HRC passed resolution 46/1 in March 2021 that mandated the OHCHR to establish an international mechanism to “collect, consolidate, analyse and preserve information and evidence and to develop possible strategies for future accountability processes.”

This international mechanism is now functioning without any contribution or role from the Sri Lankan Government. If the Sri Lankan Government wishes to reverse this process that is now hurtling towards international jurisdiction for individual criminal cases committed in Sri Lanka, then it should have presented a more comprehensive domestic accountability process.

All the victims of human rights and humanitarian law violations in Sri Lanka are citizens of this country. They are owed, at the very least, a semblance of justice from their Government. Hiding behind archaic, outdated and irrelevant norms that have little weight in international law to prevent this justice process will not help the Sri Lankan Government. Adding salt to the injury is the face of Sri Lankan diplomacy presented in Geneva and their questionable past. It is with such a team that President Ranil Wickremesinghe wishes to convince the world that Sri Lanka is serious about human rights.

The delegation at the ongoing HRC session has further proven that the current administration of President Wickremesinghe is not willing nor able to address the outstanding issues of human rights and humanitarian law violations. It is now imperative, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of victims of violations in Sri Lanka, that the international wheels of justice turn, and they turn efficiently.