Rights group says new resolution gives Sri Lankan victims a ray of hope

Human Rights Watch, a leading rights group, said that a new UN resolution on Sri Lanka, adopted by consensus, offers a ray of hope to victims of abuses and their families that they may one day see justice, despite the efforts of successive Sri Lankan governments to block accountability.

The United Nations Human Rights Council on October 6 extended a project to gather evidence of human rights violations and war crimes associated with Sri Lanka’s civil war for at least two more years.

Sri Lanka’s civil war between the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government raged between 1983 and 2009. Both sides committed countless atrocities, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and recruitment of child soldiers. In the final months of the war, which ended in the LTTE’s total defeat, an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed when the LTTE used the population as human shields and the Sri Lankan army bombarded areas it had declared as “safe zones.”

Successive Sri Lankan governments have refused to acknowledge these crimes while blocking efforts at accountability, and have used state security agencies to intimidate and surveil victim’s families. The Human Rights Council established the UN Sri Lanka Accountability Project  in 2021 after the government backtracked on commitments to establish a hybrid justice mechanism to prosecute conflict-related crimes.

The current government of President Dissanayake, who was elected in 2024, has adopted a more moderate tone than some previous administrations, but continues to reject the UN project. While it has pledged to advance post-war “reconciliation” and prosecute some emblematic cases, little progress has been made, reminding victims of previous broken promises.

The Dissanayake administration needs to honor its promises to advance domestic truth-telling and accountability by demonstrating credibility through concrete confidence-building actions. At least 20 mass graves have been discovered in Sri Lanka, but none have yet been successfully investigated. The government should ensure that ongoing excavations at the Chemmani mass grave near Jaffna are successfully completed, including by enabling the provision of equipment for DNA testing.

The government should also order police, security and intelligence agencies to end the surveillance, harassment and intimidation of victim families, human rights defenders and journalists in the north and east. And it should make good on its promises to repeal repressive laws, establish an independent prosecutor, and prosecute emblematic cases.

Human Rights Watch said that while justice is denied in Sri Lanka, the UN’s evidence-gathering project remains essential to support potential prosecutions abroad under the principle of universal jurisdiction.