Impunity in Sri Lanka is to be raised at the UN Human Rights Council which meets for its regular session from tomorrow (Monday).
Crisis Group’s Senior Consultant on Sri Lanka Alan Keenan said that as members of the UN Human Rights Council prepare to convene in Geneva starting on 11 September, the challenge of impunity in Sri Lanka will be on the agenda, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights due to report on the human rights situation in the country.
“For more than ten years, the Council has pushed Colombo to hold accountable perpetrators of atrocities during the civil war and in the years since, as well as to address the underlying governance problems that led to hostilities,” he said.
Keenan said that the UN Human Rights Council is the only international forum in which Sri Lankan leaders have been pressed to take the steps needed to move beyond the cycles of bloodshed that have bedevilled the country for too long.
“But this crucial venue could disappear in September 2024 unless a majority of members vote for a resolution that renews the basis for the Council’s regular engagement on these issues,” he added.
Keenan said that Colombo is working to make sure this engagement lapses and eager to move out of the international spotlight, the Government has been taking steps that it hopes can forestall renewal, including by promising to set up an ostensible truth and reconciliation commission that, in present circumstances, would have little to no chance of success.
“Meanwhile, the Police and military continue to obstruct investigations into enforced disappearances – including by crippling the Office on Missing Persons – and a series of high-profile political murders and massacres cited in multiple Human Rights Council resolutions. More than four years on, there has been no credible or independent probe of the 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bombings that killed 270 people, including 45 foreigners.”
The Crisis Group has released a new publication titled ‘Sri Lanka Needs Truth, but Not (Yet) a Truth Commission’ ahead of the UN Human Rights Council session.
(Source : Colombo Gazette)
