Enforced disappearances and international justice

On 30 August, as the world marked the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, Sri Lanka marked yet another year of doing precious nothing to address its ugly record on this heinous crime. Well over 100,000 citizens have been subjected to enforced disappearance by the Sri Lankan State and yet, to date, not a single individual has been held accountable.

According to international law, as long as a person remains missing, the crime of enforced disappearance is ongoing. Therefore, the cases of these tens of thousands of individuals who have been subjected to enforced disappearance by the Sri Lankan State are “continuous crimes” and no number of years passed is going to end the ongoing crime.

The two rare cases which made it to the courts were the abduction and enforced disappearance of journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda by a military intelligence unit of the Sri Lanka Army and the abduction, holding to ransom, enforced disappearance and subsequent cover-up of 11 mostly Tamil men, by an intelligence unit of the Sri Lanka navy. The former implicated then-defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the military intelligence apparatus and the latter traced all the way up to former Navy Commanders, Admirals Wasantha Karannagoda and Ravi Wijegunaratne. In 2021, the Attorney General dropped all charges against Karannagoda and he was appointed Governor of the North Western Province. The Eknaligoda case has seen no progress either. 

Instead of holding the culprits responsible successive Governments have hounded those who demand justice and worked towards accountability. IP Nishantha Silva of the CID who investigated the Navy 11 case was forced into exile while his superior, SSP Shani Abeysekera was incarcerated for 11 months over trumped-up charges.

Despite setting up an Office on Missing Persons with a mandate to search for and trace missing persons with broad legal powers of investigation it has not delivered for the victims. As a recent UN report noted, the OMP has instead focused on ‘assessing victim families’ entitlement to financial assistance, reducing ‘duplicate entries’ in their database and closure of files.’ According to this report, the OMP, established in 2018 has thus far determined the fate of 16 missing persons. Despite the discovery of over 20 mass graves, the identity of a single victim has yet to be identified offering some closure to victims.

Consecutive Governments and the judiciary have amply demonstrated that they are unwilling and most definitely incapable of delivering justice for the victims. Due to this failure, and the intentional scuttling of domestic mechanisms promised in 2015, there is now an international mechanism established at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to gather evidence of the serious human rights violations committed in Sri Lanka, especially by those who are associated with the State.

In three weeks, Foreign Minister Ali Sabry is expected to address the UN Human Rights Council as it takes up a report on Sri Lanka. He is expected to denounce the UN Accountability Project, no doubt quoting his latest catch phrase; vote bank policies of the West. Irrespective of spin doctoring by the personal lawyer of an alleged war criminal and prolific human rights violator, Sabry and others will have little to show or offer to the tens of thousands of victims of crimes carried out by the Sri Lankan State. He will once again prove that with a State’s failure to provide justice for the victims, there is only hope in international jurisdiction. When those wheels of justice do eventually turn, not only the perpetrators but also those who covered up and provided immunity to these crimes must be held accountable.