PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSIONS
Sri Lanka has a long history of setting up “commission of inquiry” whenever there is a national issue that needs addressing – it is the very first thing the Government does. Yet to date, none of these commissions have led to any meaningful legislative or executive reform whatsoever. The recommendations of each successive commission have never been implemented. This has emboldened the culture of impunity among the security forces and other perpetrators; we have seen perpetrators of human rights violations walk free, every single time.
They’ve been setting up many such Commissions since 1977, such as the “Sansoni Commission”. Several commissions were set up to investigate premeditated massacres and enforced disappearances from 1989 to 2005; however, the reports of the commissions were either not made public, or the Government did not take any action upon the findings of the commissions. We are yet to see a commission that has delivered justice to victims of governmental wrongdoing.
In her speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council, on the 21st of June 2023, the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights said, “Sri Lanka has witnessed too many ad hoc commissions in the past that failed to ensure accountability.” She specifically mentioned the Office of Missing Persons (OMP), which has “not achieved the results that provide satisfaction to victims.” In fact, the Office has failed to solve even a single case of a missing person.
Under the provisions of the Commissions of Inquiry Act of Sri Lanka, a Commission of Inquiry is a “fact-finding” mission – no judicial powers are granted to them. It just so happens that the same model is used for every commission relating to human rights abuses or reconciliation.
The President can decide whether a commission’s findings should be made public, whether partly or fully, owing to reasons related to “national security”. But this provision has been misused by successive governments to hide incidents of serious human rights violations and protect the names of the perpetrators. To top it off, it is the President alone who decides whether they want to implement the recommendations of a Commission of Inquiry – not the people, nor their elected representatives in Parliament.
This is but a taste of the many deliberate and fatal flaws that the Commissions face. The commissions are not given the tools to enforce their recommendations, leaving the government and its security services free to do anything they like. The many failed commissions of Sri Lanka have all been set up to deceive the international community.
AL JAZEERA’S HEAD-TO-HEAD PROGRAM
The Sri Lankan politician portraying a gentleman distinguishing himself as if the western world’s nobleman, but the nefarious former president and six times prime minister Ranil Wickremasinghe was publicly stripped off his mask of the scandalous political life that ruined Sri Lanka, by Mehdhi Hasan during Al Jazeera’s Head-to-Head interview that took place in Convey Hall, London on 05 February 2025.
During the two-hour recording of the event, Mehdhi Hasan bombarded with piercing questions to which Ranil was dodging with his usual bluffing, but he was exposed when it came to the questions on “Batalanta Commission” Report. The unearthing of the Batalanta Commission Report has not only revealed the true nature of Ranil, but also the network of the military and police including his predecessors.
This report is a typical example of how human rights are violated in Sri Lanka. If this had been the treatment of their own people (Sinhala), no one needs an intelligent person to visualise what they would have done to the Tamil people, who were abducted or surrendered during and after the war in 2009.
The profound culture of impunity and entrenched racial hatred against Tamil people from the outset of independence in 1948, regardless of which Sinhala hegemonic government was in power, has had the ingrained mindset of protecting each other from atrocity crimes committed on Tamil people.
Even though Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government set up the Batalanta Commission against her rival Ranil’s government, Chandrika did not take the next level of action despite Ranil’s serious crimes during his tenure. This is the political culture of those in power regardless of policy differences in governing the country. In this context, expecting an internal criminal prosecution mechanism will never establish justice.
Ranil’s comment at one stage that thousands of Tamil people voluntarily surrendered in the last phase of the war were presumed dead, raises serious doubts that he knows they were deliberately killed.
IMPORTANCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY’S ROLE TO ESTABLISH JUSTICE, ACCOUNTABILITY AND A PERMANENT POLITICAL SOLUTION
By drawing the foregoing attention to the international community, how the so-called successive democratic governments ruined the island, expecting justice and accountability for the atrocity crimes is callous.
Unless an international criminal prosecution mechanism is institutionalised, Tamil people will never receive justice and accountability for the crimes inflicted on them. It is a mere mirage.
https://sangam.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Batalanda-Commission-Report-Book-English-Final.pdf
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