Sri Lankan Government’s Ten-Year Anniversary Gift: Pending Justice in Post-War Sri Lanka
The horrific civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (“LTTE”) intermittently persisted for over twenty-five years and ended in May 2009.1 This genocide’s2 casualty toll and other statistics have yet to be calculated.3 Nonetheless, many thousands of Sri Lankans have been victims of heinous human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.4 While national tension and communal relations have improved, the government must acknowledge and redress its flagrant human rights violations to progress.5 However, the government has not been held proportionately accountable and has only made slow, inadequate reparations—specifically in the context of counterterrorism reformation.6
The Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1979 (“PTA”) historically enabled war crimes, crimes against humanity, and grievous human rights violations under the guise of counter-terrorism.7 To combat “unlawful activities,”8 the PTA bestows upon police extensive powers to arrest, enter and search any premises, stop and search suspects, and seize any document or thing—without a warrant.9 Government officials are granted immunity for their actions when acting in good faith or fulfilling an order pursuant to the PTA,10 thereby enabling officials to torture citizens with impunity.11
During the civil war, the government utilized the PTA to detain, torture, execute, and disappear innumerable Tamils whom governmental entities assumed had potential connections to the LTTE, as this terrorist organization was comprised exclusively of Tamils.12 One such example is the case of the Trinco 5.13 In January 2006, government security forces murdered five Tamil students and seriously wounded two others.14 The government asserted that the students were LTTE members executing a grenade attack, but these claims were unfounded.15 Further, government entities issued death threats to surviving family members who pressed for justice.16 To date, the Trinco 5 have not received justice, and all suspects have been acquitted.17
In 2015, Sri Lanka vowed to repeal the PTA and replace it with legislation complying with international standards.18 However, the PTA has yet to be repealed,19 and police continue to use the PTA as justification for violating Tamils’ human rights.20 Under the PTA, police torture detained citizens, denying them their basic rights and coercing confessions.21 For instance, police arrested Vijaykumar Ketheeswaran in 2014 and detained him for seventeen months. When in custody, officers burned Ketheeswaran with cigarettes while trying to extract a confession.22
The UN Special Rapporteur found that eighty percent of PTA detainees arrested in 2016 complained of torture and ill-treatment,23 and that the government detained over one-hundred PTA prisoners awaiting conviction.24 The PTA has systemically denied due process by permitting arbitrary detentions.25 For example, police arrested Vivodhani Givoshan in 2010 and detained him for ten months without charge. The court eventually dismissed Givoshan’s case in 2014.26
While the PTA permits the detainment of suspects for a maximum of eighteen months without charge,27 the government has consistently held detainees for significantly longer periods.28 Police arrested Murali Rajalechchami in 2008, detaining and torturing him for over five years without filing charges.29 In 2013, a judge acquitted Murali after finding absolutely no evidence against him.30 As of March 2018, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka acknowledged widespread incidents of violence against detainees.31 For Tamils who are not detained, police continue to subject Tamils to ethnic profiling, surveillance, and harassment on the basis of counter-terrorism.32
To provide justice to victims of the government’s flagrant human rights violations, the government must repeal the PTA, improve detention conditions, and provide transparency and accountability.33 As long as the government fails to acknowledge and appropriately redress its atrocious treatment of Tamils, lasting peace in Sri Lanka and healthy ethnic relations for Sri Lankans will remain elusive.34
Ranshitha Devendran is an international graduate fellow of Fordham International Law Journal Volume XLIII.
This is a student blog post and in no way represents the views of the Fordham International Law Journal.
1 See, e.g., Amnesty Int’l, Amnesty International Report 2017/18: The State of the World’s Human Rights 342 (2018), https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL1067002018ENGLISH.PDF; Human Rights Watch, World Report 2019: Events of 2018 543 (2019), https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/ world_report_download/hrw_world_report_2019.pdf.
2 See Damien Kingsbury, Sri Lanka and the Responsibility to Protect: Politics, Ethnicity and Genocide 83 (2012) (ebook) (assessing whether the human rights violations rose to a level of severity amounting to a genocide); Sharry Aiken and Cheran Rudhramoorthy, Rwanda and Sri Lanka: A Tale of Two Genocides, Conversation (May 16, 2019, 3:59 PM), https://theconversation.com/rwanda-and-sri-lanka-a-tale-of-two-genocides-116135 (comparing the Rwandan genocide to the Sri Lankan genocide).
3 Mujib Mashal, For Sri Lanka, a Long History of Violence, NY Times (Apr. 21, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/ 2019/04/21/world/asia/sri-lanka-history-civil-war.html.
4 U.N. Human Rights Council, Rep. of the OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka, ¶ 70, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/30/CRP.2 (Sept. 16, 2015). See generally OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka, U.N. Hum. Rts. Council, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/OISL.aspx (last visited Nov. 25, 2019) (providing factsheets detailing the allegations of war crimes, such as: torture, cruel treatment, inhuman or degrading treatment, sexual and gender-based violence, deprivations of liberty, enforced disappearances, unlawful killings, abduction and forced recruitment of adults, requirement and use of children in hostilities, and forced displacement).
5 See UN Officials Outraged at Accounts of Sri Lanka War Crimes, Stress need for Accountability, UN News (Sept. 17, 2015), https://news.un.org/en/story/2015/09/509112; Sri Lanka: Human Rights Must Be at the Heart of the Next Presidency, Amnesty Int’l (Oct. 18, 2019, 11:01 AM), https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/ 2019/10/sri-lanka-human-rights-must-be-at-the-heart-of-next-presidency/; Amnesty Int’l, Flickering Hope: Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Nonrecurrence in Sri Lanka 25 (2019), https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Flickering-Hope.pdf.
6 See Sri Lanka: Human Rights Must Be at the Heart of the Next Presidency, supra note 5; Flickering Hope, supra note 5, at 21; Sri Lanka: Repeal Draconian Security Law, Hum. Rts. Watch (Jan. 29, 2018), https://www.hrw.org/ news/2018/01/29/sri-lanka-repeal-draconian-security-law#; see also Mark Leon Goldberg, A Ten Year Old War Crime Is Sowing Instability in Sri Lanka Today, UN Dispatch, (Dec. 27, 2018), https://www.undispatch.com/ a-ten-year-old-war-crime-is-sowing-instability-in-sri-lanka-today/.
7 See Sri Lanka: Repeal Draconian Security Law, supra note 6.
8 Prevention of Terrorism Act, 1979, No. 48, Acts of Parliament, 1979 (Sri Lanka) § 31, cl. 1; Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) (Amendment) Act, 1979, No. 48, Acts of Parliament, 1979 (Sri Lanka) § 5.
9 Prevention of Terrorism Act, supra note 8, at § 6, cl. 1.
10 Id. at § 26.
11 U.S. Dep’t of State, Sri Lanka 2018 Human Rights Report 3-4 (2019), https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/SRI-LANKA-2018.pdf.
12 Human Rights Watch, Locked Up Without Evidence: Abuses Under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act 11-12 (2018), https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/srilanka0118_web_0.pdf.
13 Sri Lanka: No Justice for ‘Trinco 5’, Hum. Rts. Watch (July 8, 2019), https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/07/ 08/sri-lanka-no-justice-trinco-5; Yolanda Foster, Justice Denied for Trinco 5, Groundviews (July 8, 2019), https://groundviews.org/2019/07/08/justice-denied-for-trinco-5/.
14 Sri Lanka: No Justice for ‘Trinco 5’, supra note 13; Yolanda Foster, supra note 13.
15 Sri Lanka: No Justice for ‘Trinco 5’, supra note 13; Yolanda Foster, supra note 13.
16 Sri Lanka: No Justice for ‘Trinco 5’, supra note 13; Yolanda Foster, supra note 13.
17 Sri Lanka: No Justice for ‘Trinco 5’, supra note 13 (discussing evidence that government officials “told the US ambassador to Sri Lanka that the security forces were responsible for the killings, but claimed there was no evidence to convict them” and that security forces may have had two guns to commit murders with impunity); Yolanda Foster, supra note 13.
18 See Sri Lanka: Repeal Draconian Security Law, supra note 6.
19 See Sri Lanka: Human Rights Must Be at the Heart of the Next Presidency, supra note 5 (suggesting that, as of October 2019, the PTA has yet to be replaced).
20 See id.; U.S. Dep’t of State, supra note 11, at 3; Marisa de Silva, Swasthika Arulingam, and Ruki Fernando, Continuing Abuse Under PTA: Abductions, Arbitrary Arrests, Unlawful Detentions and Torture, Groundviews (June 28, 2016), https://groundviews.org/2016/06/28/continuing-abuse-under-pta-abductions-arbitrary-arrests-unlawful-detentions-and-torture/.
21 See Human Rights Watch, supra note 12, at 2-5.
22 Id. at 22-23.
23 U.N. Human Rights Council, Visit to Sri Lanka: Rep. of the Special Rapporteur, ¶ 25, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/40/52/Add.3 (Dec. 14, 2018).
24 Amnesty Int’l, supra note 1, at 342.
25 Prevention of Terrorism Act, supra note 8, at § 9, cl. 1.
26 Human Rights Watch, supra note 12, at 26.
27 Prevention of Terrorism Act, supra note 8, at § 9.
28 During a July 2017 visit, the UN Special Rapporteur observed that of eighty-one prisoners in pretrial detention awaiting police investigation and charges from the Attorney General’s department, seventy prisoners had been detained without trial for more than five years, and twelve prisoners had been detained without trial for over a decade. U.N. Human Rights Council, supra note 23, at ¶ 15. See also Human Rights Watch, supra note 12, at 22.
29 Human Rights Watch, supra note 12, at 29-30.
30 Id. at 30.
31 U.S. Dep’t of State, supra note 11, at 3.
32 See Amnesty Int’l, supra note 1, at 343.
33 See Human Rights Watch, supra note 12, at 43; Amnesty Int’l, supra note 1, at 342; Human Rights Watch, supra note 1, at 543-46 (detailing current issues that must be rectified).
34 See Aiken and Rudhramoorthy, supra note 2.