Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted yet another resolution on accountability for mass atrocities committed in Sri Lanka. It was the latest in a long series of measures the global body has taken since the armed conflict reached its brutal climax in 2009. Then, tens of thousands of Tamils were massacred in what multiple U.N. reports have since recognized as systematic crimes.
The resolution, adopted without a vote, extends the mandate of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ war crime evidence-gathering project for another two years. There will be more reports and a continued focus on the island in the years to come. Sixteen years since the massacres at Mullivaikkal, Sri Lanka remains very much on the agenda in Geneva.
However, Tamil victims on the island and around the world are not celebrating. Instead, the resolution has been met with denunciations. There is a weary, familiar frustration that the world’s most powerful human rights body has once again failed to hold Sri Lanka’s war criminals to account, more than a decade and half later.
More of the Same
The resolution has been widely panned by observers as the weakest on Sri Lanka since such measures on accountability were first introduced at the UNHRC in 2012.
In those early years, resolutions gradually became firmer, demanding more concrete action from Colombo as its resistance to delivering any accountability for war crimes became more apparent. Initially, the resolutions would ask domestic mechanisms to ensure prosecutions would take place and disappearances were investigated, or for the repeal of draconian legislation such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). Eventually, in 2015, after a new, seemingly more progressive regime came into power, the call for a “hybrid court” with foreign judges and prosecutors was unanimously adopted in Geneva.
Since then, that pledge has quietly been abandoned. No such court has ever appeared.
Instead, the latest resolution regresses back to putting faith in Sri Lanka’s domestic mechanisms. These processes remain deeply flawed and rejected entirely by the victims themselves, as a hollow whitewash for the Sri Lankan state. Some of these mechanisms have already been active for years and have yet to provide any meaningful results.
The Office of Missing Persons (OMP), for example, was first set up in 2017. But it has yet to locate a single forcibly disappeared person or identify a single perpetrator. Even the United Nations has acknowledged this abysmal record. In 2022, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that the OMP “has not been able to trace a single disappeared person or clarify the fate of the disappeared in meaningful ways.”
The retreat in language from the global body seems therefore inexplicable. Activists question why the international community continues to put its in a state that has demonstrated for decades that it is incapable and unwilling to reform.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has pointed to the apparently “positive” moves from the new regime in charge in Colombo. The election of Anura Kumara Dissanayake as president has certainly shaken Sri Lanka’s Sinhala political establishment in the south of the island. His National People’s Power coalition rode an anti-establishment wave, in light of the country’s devastating 2022 economic crisis, that saw him sweep the polls. Even when it came to the Tamil question, Dissanayake pledged to abolish the PTA, to release military occupied land, and finally provide a solution to the decades-long ethnic conflict that has plagued the island.
Yet, after more than a year in power, little of that promised reform has materialized.
The Sri Lankan military, one of the largest in the world per capita, still occupies vast swathes of land across the Tamil North-East. Tamil mothers have continued their roadside protests demanding information on their disappeared loved ones. Arrests under the PTA have continued. And the Tamil people remain no closer to the freedom they have demanded. New promises of yet another mechanism, this time an Independent Prosecutor’s Office, should be met with the skepticism they deserve.
While Dissanayake’s language has certainly softened from the brash Sinhala nationalist rhetoric of the Rajapaksas, the driving politics behind it has not – as evident from even his own deference to it.
Indeed, even at the UNHRC, the Sri Lankan government remained as staunch in its rejection of the resolution, and any moves toward an internationalized accountability mechanism, as the regimes before it.
Tamil Fury Grows
In Jaffna, as the UNHRC was meeting, Tamil mothers were enraged.
They had spent countless months steadfastly holding portraits of their loved ones, most of whom were last seen in the custody of the Sri Lankan army. Dozens of children are among the disappeared, and hundreds of their mothers have passed away from illness and old age during the long wait for answers. After years of roadside demonstrations and meetings with international officials, they are no closer to knowing what happened to their kith and kin.
The resolution in Geneva made it clear their calls had fallen on deaf ears.
As they gripped the last photographs they had and loudly wailed, shedding tears, their frustration was clear to see. In a symbolic act of protest, the protesting mothers went on to burn copies of the resolution.
For years, several of these activists had faced down intimidation and harassment from Sri Lankan state forces. Their courage has seen them become the most steadfast and prominent campaigners on the island. carrying out the longest continuous demonstration in the island’s history.
Some held European or American flags, in hopes of appealing to Western powers. Several had even traveled to the UNHRC in Geneva multiple times to make their pleas in person.
But their steadfast cooperation and pleading with global powers has borne no fruit. There was still no firm step taken toward ensuring accountability. A weakened resolution meant that while Sri Lanka remains on the agenda, it has slid backwards.
It is a sentiment that has been echoed by Tamils across the island and diaspora organizations around the world. There was no praise for the mere fact that Sri Lanka continues to be raised at the U.N. Human Rights Council. To the Tamil people, the latest resolution felt like a betrayal.
Moving Beyond the U.N.
The frustration at the slow-moving pace of the global system is not just a Sri Lanka problem, as the catastrophes in Gaza and Sudan clearly illustrate. But the atrocities in Sri Lanka, which are being increasingly recognized as a genocide, are a clear test case. And it is one that the global body has been failing.
The repeated bombing of hospitals, the intentional withholding of food and medicine, the incessant shelling and massacre of civilians are all crimes which, left unpunished, have festered and even been repeated elsewhere. The Sri Lankan state continues to deny any semblance of accountability; war criminals and perpetrators of rights abuses continue to roam free.
Though continued U.N. oversight may seem like welcome action, the path to accountability may now lie outside the global body’s cautious, procedural, and toothless response.
For those who truly would like to see the ghosts of the island’s past truly put to rest and a stable future peace built, the crimes of 2009 cannot be left unpunished. That means global actors must start pursuing universal jurisdiction cases, enacting targeted sanctions, and looking to move Sri Lanka into different global fora such as the International Criminal Court.
Sixteen years after the massacres at Mullivaikkal, if the United Nations cannot act, others must.