{"id":148397,"date":"2025-03-08T15:59:17","date_gmt":"2025-03-08T22:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=148397"},"modified":"2025-03-08T16:01:17","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T23:01:17","slug":"inconsistency-thy-name-is-unhrc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2025\/03\/08\/inconsistency-thy-name-is-unhrc\/","title":{"rendered":"Inconsistency, Thy Name is UNHRC"},"content":{"rendered":"

N Sathiya Moorthy\u00a0<\/strong>Ceylon Today\u00a07 March 2025<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

The incumbent Government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake can thank its stars and also the West-dominated \u2018Sri Lanka Core Group\u2019 at the UNHRC for the latter extending \u2018diplomatic goodwill\u2019 towards Colombo and welcoming the \u2018peaceful elections and smooth transition-of-power\u2019, as if they were expecting\/anticipating something different this time (too). They have acknowledged that the new Government \u2018has only been in place for four months\u2019, a grace-period they have always given in the past during every \u2018regime-change\u2019, especially when the Rajapaksas were the losers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, without losing their \u2018focus\u2019 from the past decade and more, the Core Group has also urged the Government \u2018to use the opportunity that this transition represents to address the challenges it faces\u2019. In saying so, it did \u2018appreciate  the Government\u2019s 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\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the same vein, they did \u2018welcome commitments to implement devolution in accordance with the Constitution and to make progress on governance reforms\u2019. Ask the \u2018affected communities\u2019, particularly the war-affected Tamils, you will have \u2018nay\u2019 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\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018in 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\u2019. They took \u2018note the Government\u2019s stated intention to replace the Prevention of Terrorism Act and emphasise that any new legislation should be in line with Sri Lanka\u2019s international obligations\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the \u2018Government 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\u2019, the group\u2019s brief statement read. The victory, if it\u2019s any, this time for the Sri Lankan State as an institution, independent of political identities, is that the Core Group has also sought to \u2018encourage the Government to re-invigorate the work of domestic institutions focused on reparations and missing persons\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carrot and hidden stick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018willingness to work with the Government to ensure that any future transitional justice mechanisms are independent, inclusive, meaningful, and meet the expectations of affected communities\u2019, the Core Group is actually telling the new rulers to \u2018behave\u2019 as told, politely for now but not always so in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, it is anybody\u2019s guess how \u2018corruption\u2019 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\u2019s about the impact of large-scale corruption over the years on the nation\u2019s economy, but that is for the IMF to worry about as far as Sri Lanka is concerned at present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transitional justice<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is another matter that the Core Group\u2019s insistence still on \u2018transitional justice\u2019 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 \u2013 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 \u2018transitional justice mechanisms are independent, inclusive, meaningful\u2019, as if implying the deployment of foreign investigators, lawyers and judges \u2013 a less-veiled proposal that was rejected by Sri Lanka even when first made and repeated in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That way, even the reference for the \u2018transitional mechanism\u2026. to meet the expectations of the affected communities\u2019 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 \u2018non-Tamil\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018affected communities\u2019 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 \u2018affected communities\u2019 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ritualistic, predictable<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is in this context that the Dissanayake Government\u2019s concerns over UNHRC\u2019s \u2018inconsistent application of human rights principles\u2019 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 \u2018national consensus\u2019 that is a rarity in this country and mostly elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Government\u2019s reaction was in response to the OHCHR\u2019s \u2018oral update\u2019 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\u2019s report or the Core Group response or even a new resolution that they place before the full House for vote and approval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We remain steadfast in our belief that national ownership with gradual reforms, is the only practical way forward to transformative change,\u2019 Ambassador Himalee Arunatilaka, Sri Lanka\u2019s Permanent Representative (PR) to the United Nations in Geneva said, responding to the OHCHR\u2019s oral update. What her political masters back home however have to remember is that when their honeymoon with the West is over \u2013 whatever the fate of the same in the domestic context \u2013 the Core Group would dust past OHRC reports of the kind, and haul up Sri Lanka over the coals for \u2018past sins\u2019 that had been left \u2018unpunished\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018legacy issue\u2019 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: \u2018We 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.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018external evidence-gathering mechanism on Sri Lanka within the OHCHR is an unprecedented and ad hoc expansion of the Council\u2019s mandate, and contradicts its founding principles of impartiality, objectivity and non-selectivity\u2019. After all, as she further pointed out, \u2018No 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\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018personal use\u2019 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 \u2013 or, did she?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Inconsistency, Thy Name is UNHRC<\/a><\/blockquote>