Over the last 25 years, successive Sri-Lankan regimes have failed to investigate properly any of the political murders, rapes and mass graves.

Local commissions investigating alleged rights abuses have been incomplete or inconclusive. For
example, the former President Ranasinghe Premadasa set up a Presidential Commission in 1991 to inquire into reported cases of disappearance. It achieved nothing!

According to Amnesty’s report “Twenty Years of Make-Believe” published in 2009:

1. There have been many Presidential Commissions and Inquires in Sri Lanka. Commissions of Inquiry have not worked as mechanisms of justice in Sri Lanka.

Presidential Commissions have proved to be little more than tools to launch partisan attacks against opponents or to deflect criticism when the state has been faced with overwhelming evidence of its complicity in human rights violations.

2. The failure of the Presidential Commissions and Inquires as a justice strategy has been demonstrated most clearly by the findings of the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP), a group invited by the President of Sri Lanka to observe the Presidential Commission of Inquiry’s work, which concluded that
the government of Sri Lanka was not willing to “investigate cases with vigour, where the conduct of its own forces has been called into question.”

The new government must demonstrate clearly that it will investigate all the allegations of war crimes and murders properly and bring the perpetrators to justice – whoever they are!

Suspected War Criminals must not be allowed to set the terms of the UN investigation.

Google the following:

Twenty Years of Make-Believe;

Recurring Nightmare: State Responsibility for Disappearances and Abductions in Sri-Lanka.