SA group welcomes UN report on Sri Lanka
SOUTH African-based human rights organisation Solidarity Group for Peace and Justice in Sri Lanka (SGPJ) has welcomed the report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) at the current sitting of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).
The long-awaited report was the result of an independent and credible investigation, which acknowledged that the grave human rights violations committed by the Sri Lankan army under the previous Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapakse, amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The OHCHR must be congratulated for its report despite the difficulties faced by the investigators of the OHCHR and the life-threatening risks taken by witnesses.
The report finds the Sri Lankan security forces and some paramilitary groups responsible for disturbing violations of international law, including unlawful killings, deprivation of liberty, sexual violence and enforced disappearances.
Further, the Sri Lankan government denied humanitarian assistance and conducted indiscriminate shelling and attacks on civilians and hospitals in no-fire zones.
High Commissioner Prince Zeid said: “Our investigation has laid bare the horrific level of violations and abuses that occurred in Sri Lanka, including indiscriminate shelling, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, harrowing accounts of torture and sexual violence, recruitment of children and other grave crimes… Importantly, the report reveals violations that are among the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.”
The SGPJ has come out in full support of High Commissioner Zeid’s call for the establishment of a hybrid special court, integrating international judges, prosecutors, lawyers and investigators, as an essential step for justice.
It also agrees with his finding that “a purely domestic court procedure will have no chance of overcoming widespread and justifiable suspicions fuelled by decades of violations, malpractice and broken promises”.
The report suggests that the “UNHRC owes it to Sri Lankans – and to its own credibility – to ensure an accountability process that produces results, decisively moves beyond the failures of the past, and brings the deep institutional changes needed to guarantee non-recurrence”.
In its press statement, the SGPJ called on the South African government and member states of the UNHRC to adopt a resolution that encapsulated all the recommendations of the OHCHR report.
However, world-renowned international law expert, Professor Francis Boyle, who teaches at the University of Illinois, has a different view, that “a Truth and Reconciliation Process does not work within the context of genocide”, and that instead of the hybrid court recommended by investigation into Sri Lanka, there is a “need for an International Criminal Tribunal for Sri Lanka, or else a referral by the United Nations Security Council to the International Criminal Court”.
He goes on to warn that reforms by the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) will not happen and Sinhala genocide against the Tamils will simply and predictably continue.