N Sathiya Moorthy Ceylon Today 7 March 2025

The incumbent Government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake can thank its stars and also the West-dominated ‘Sri Lanka Core Group’ at the UNHRC for the latter extending ‘diplomatic goodwill’ towards Colombo and welcoming the ‘peaceful elections and smooth transition-of-power’, as if they were expecting/anticipating something different this time (too). They have acknowledged that the new Government ‘has only been in place for four months’, a grace-period they have always given in the past during every ‘regime-change’, especially when the Rajapaksas were the losers.

Yet, without losing their ‘focus’ from the past decade and more, the Core Group has also urged the Government ‘to use the opportunity that this transition represents to address the challenges it faces’. In saying so, it did ‘appreciate  the Government’s commitment to making meaningful progress on reconciliation and the initial steps taken, including returning land, lifting road-blocks, and allowing communities in the North and East to commemorate the past and to memorialise their loved ones’.

In the same vein, they did ‘welcome commitments to implement devolution in accordance with the Constitution and to make progress on governance reforms’. Ask the ‘affected communities’, particularly the war-affected Tamils, you will have ‘nay’ for a response to every one of the accolades that the Core Group has conferred on this Government as used to be the case with every new Government barring the Rajapaksas’.

Yet, as if to set the future agenda for the new Government, the Core Group, Canada, Malawi, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and the UK,  said that ‘in order to build and sustain trust, it is essential to ensure the protection of civil society spaces, including by ending surveillance and intimidation of civil society actors and organisations’. They took ‘note the Government’s stated intention to replace the Prevention of Terrorism Act and emphasise that any new legislation should be in line with Sri Lanka’s international obligations’.

As the ‘Government seeks to make progress on human rights and corruption cases,  we urge that any comprehensive reconciliation and accountability process carry the support of affected communities, build on past recommendations and meet international standards’, the group’s brief statement read. The victory, if it’s any, this time for the Sri Lankan State as an institution, independent of political identities, is that the Core Group has also sought to ‘encourage the Government to re-invigorate the work of domestic institutions focused on reparations and missing persons’.

Carrot and hidden stick

Therein also concealed is the stick that the West would want to wield or the brickbats that it would want to throw at Sri Lanka even while their hands seemingly offer carrots and bouquets, instead.  By reaffirming their ‘willingness to work with the Government to ensure that any future transitional justice mechanisms are independent, inclusive, meaningful, and meet the expectations of affected communities’, the Core Group is actually telling the new rulers to ‘behave’ as told, politely for now but not always so in the future.

It is the kind of treatment that past governments in the post-war period have been dealt with, with each new resolution moved by them and passed by the Council against Colombo’s protests and abstentions. They have often added a new element for investigation by the even more controversial Office of Human Rights Commissioner (OHRC) that had nothing to do with the LTTE war, which was what their maiden resolution was all about.

For instance, it is anybody’s guess how ‘corruption’ can become a part of the UNHRC Charter or a Council resolution or even a statement of the Core Group kind.  It may be a different matter if it’s about the impact of large-scale corruption over the years on the nation’s economy, but that is for the IMF to worry about as far as Sri Lanka is concerned at present.

Transitional justice

It is another matter that the Core Group’s insistence still on ‘transitional justice’ again has a loaded meaning under international human rights contexts as selectively applied by the West, that too at the time and place of their choosing – and as a diplomatic tool, for which lesser members of the Core Group, too, have no real use in the Sri Lankan context, especially. The same is true of their continued reference for ensuring that ‘transitional justice mechanisms are independent, inclusive, meaningful’, as if implying the deployment of foreign investigators, lawyers and judges – a less-veiled proposal that was rejected by Sri Lanka even when first made and repeated in the past.

That way, even the reference for the ‘transitional mechanism…. to meet the expectations of the affected communities’ does not have much meaning far away from the war-period that is still fifteen years young. If the reference is to the war-affected Tamils, their polity and society is so much divided within themselves, owing mainly to ego clashes, since the end of the war. Their place, especially that of the ‘non-Tamil’ Tamil parties in the Tamil-majority areas of the North and the East, has gone to the ruling centre-left JVP-NPP in the Parliamentary elections last year.

With the nation-wide Local Government Elections and the nine Provincial Council elections, both due later this year, will the West accept it as the voice of the ‘affected communities’ if the JVP-NPP records substantial victories in the Tamil areas, in either or both? And if the rulers in Colombo cite the endorsement of the elected representatives from the ‘affected communities’ for the Governments schemes on the reconciliation front, will the Core Group and the rest of the West be willing to accept it as all that needed doing?

Ritualistic, predictable

It is in this context that the Dissanayake Government’s concerns over UNHRC’s ‘inconsistent application of human rights principles’ needs to be viewed and understood. Of course, it is a repeat of all that the previous Governments had told the international community from the UNHRC and elsewhere, but coming as it does from the incumbent dispensation that is new to political administration, such a construct also implies a ‘national consensus’ that is a rarity in this country and mostly elsewhere.

The Government’s reaction was in response to the OHCHR’s ‘oral update’ to the full Council on Sri Lanka, a ritual that has become ritualistic for its predictability, and hence has become unexciting and boring for those who are all served the same old stuff in the same old bottle. Suffice to point out that any regular newspaper reader in Sri Lanka could tell you what more to expect in terms of incidents and episodes in the next instalment of the OHCHR’s report or the Core Group response or even a new resolution that they place before the full House for vote and approval.

We remain steadfast in our belief that national ownership with gradual reforms, is the only practical way forward to transformative change,’ Ambassador Himalee Arunatilaka, Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative (PR) to the United Nations in Geneva said, responding to the OHCHR’s oral update. What her political masters back home however have to remember is that when their honeymoon with the West is over – whatever the fate of the same in the domestic context – the Core Group would dust past OHRC reports of the kind, and haul up Sri Lanka over the coals for ‘past sins’ that had been left ‘unpunished’.

It is this inevitable fall-out on an undated future that successive governments have ignored or overlooked or have deliberately left it behind as a ‘legacy issue’ for their successors to tackle in their time. It is also in this unsaid background that the Sri Lankan PR had this to tell the UNHRC, matter-of-factly: ‘We regret the continuing inconsistent application of human rights principles through the work of the Council. This has resulted in the erosion of trust in the human rights architecture making countries less likely to respect the noble purposes for which the Human Rights Council was created.’

In context, Ambassador Arunatilaka recalled how Sri Lanka has consistently spoken out against country-specific resolutions that do not have the concurrence of the country concerned. As she pointed out, the ‘external evidence-gathering mechanism on Sri Lanka within the OHCHR is an unprecedented and ad hoc expansion of the Council’s mandate, and contradicts its founding principles of impartiality, objectivity and non-selectivity’. After all, as she further pointed out, ‘No sovereign State can accept the super-imposition of an external mechanism that runs contrary to its Constitution and which pre-judges the commitment of its domestic legal processes’.

Rewind to the all-but-forgotten Darusman Report supposedly for the personal understanding of then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, but whose preliminary and final reports uncannily found their way to the media with persistent consistency, and you would also remember where it all was meant to head. Much of it became known when Ki-moon broke the ‘personal use’ charade and forwarded the reports officially to the then UN Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, who was as controversial as the OHCHR that she headed and the UNHRC that she served – or, did she?

Inconsistency, Thy Name is UNHRC

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)