THE HUMAN RIGHTS CHALLENGE

Dr. Jehan Perera deconstructs a gauntlet thrown down by the United Nations

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s report on Sri Lanka has found its government to be deficient in many areas. Her office will continue to monitor the situation in the months ahead – at least until September when the United Nations Human Rights Coun­cil (UNHRC) meets again in Geneva to decide whether to continue with this effort.

The most significant issue is the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) due to the EU’s warning it expects the govern­ment to meet international human rights commitments as a condition for continuing with the GSP+ facility.

This law permits the state to detain persons indefinitely on suspicion of ‘terrorism,’ which is vaguely and broadly defined. Among the government’s amendments is pro­vision for bail after one year of detention without a charge.

The question remains whether this is adequate since that’s a long time to deprive a person of his or her liberty without presenting charges and on mere suspicion of an ill-defined activity.

A call for the amendment of the PTA is being made today, under circumstances that are very different from when it was first introduced as a temporary law to deal with a growing armed insurrection in 1979.

This point was brought out forcefully in the Court of Appeal’s decision to release law­yer Hejaaz Hizbullah after he was detained for nearly two years.

In her judgement, Justice Menaka Wijesundera noted: “Four decades have passed and the PTA has strayed far away from its historical con­text. The PTA, if in its appli­cation and implementation, creates a vicious cycle of abuse, the very purpose of the statute will be defeated.”

Apart from working on the PTA, the government needs to show progress on many other fronts too. The UN High Commissioner’s report cites the use of former and present military personnel to run civilian affairs, and threats against a civil society that operates free of state control.

More significantly, it notes that for the past two years or so, the government has not formulated a formal and credible new road map for transitional justice and accounta­bility. In addition, there are observations about the lack of progress on a proper in­vestigation into the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019.

The terminology of ‘transi­tional justice’ has been used sparingly in the present period as it includes the concept of accountability for past human rights violations, which the government denies more than it is prepared to accept.

This means dealing with human rights violations that occurred during the war and finding solutions. It necessi­tates revisiting the past and ensuring that the truth about what happened is ascertained.

But this leads to two consequences.

One is that those who did wrong and violated human rights or committed war time crimes are held accountable – and this implies punishment. The other is that those who suffered and were victimised are provided with compensa­tion to rebuild their lives to whatever extent possible, and also ensure that such violations don’t recur in the future.

Though two state mechanisms have been established for the purpose of transitional justice – i.e. the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) and Office for Reparations (OR) – these have yet to live up to their promise.

There are two important measures that the government needs to take for these two mechanisms to be useful. The first is to meet the needs of the families of those who went missing during the war. Some of the missing are among those who surrendered to the security forces in the last phase of the war – so the government must know what happened to them. Their family members, who are still living, want to know if their loved ones are alive or dead.

There is a similarity in the government’s failure to address this issue and its inability to find the culprits in the Easter bombings. In the case of the Easter Sunday victims however, at least their families know the fate of their loved ones. In the case of war victims, they cannot be sure.

Even though almost 13 years have passed since the war ended, they can’t be sure that their loved ones are no longer alive. They still hope and believe that their children, husbands or relatives may be somewhere. Those who lost their family members wish to know what happened – and by whose hand.

Archbishop of Colombo Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith was allowed a special meeting with Bachelet in Geneva due to the validity of the Catholic Church’s concerns. The government has to address these problems in a meaningful way as they will not simply disappear.