Sri Lanka accused of stalling justice for past atrocities
Human Rights Watch says limited progress under President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has failed to end decades of impunity for killings and disappearances
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (MNTV) — Sri Lanka has failed to move with sufficient urgency to prosecute grave abuses committed during decades of conflict despite reopening several prominent investigations, Human Rights Watch said, warning that victims and their families continue to wait for justice.
In a 49-page report, the rights group examined seven major cases involving killings, enforced disappearances and attacks on journalists and aid workers.
It said President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s government, which took office in 2024, had made some progress but many cases remained stalled while victims’ families and rights defenders continued to face intimidation.
HRW based its findings on interviews with 32 victims, relatives of disappeared people, lawyers and human rights defenders, as well as court documents and other records.
Sri Lanka’s unresolved abuses stretch across the 1987-1989 Marxist insurgency in the south and the nearly three-decade civil war between government forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which ended in 2009.
Tens of thousands of people were killed, tortured, abducted or forcibly disappeared by security forces and armed groups during the conflicts.
Successive governments have established more than 10 commissions since the 1990s to investigate violations, but HRW said they failed to produce prosecutions or establish what happened to thousands of missing people.
Dissanayake’s government has revived some investigations previously obstructed or derailed, including the 2009 murder of newspaper editor Lasantha Wickrematunge, the 2010 disappearance of journalist Prageeth Ekneligoda and the alleged abduction by naval intelligence officers of 11 young men held for ransom in 2008 and 2009.
Investigators have also moved forward with an inquiry into allegations of a high-level conspiracy linked to the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, which killed 269 people.
Police arrested former military intelligence officer Suresh Sallay in February over alleged collusion with an Islamist group accused of carrying out the attacks.
A court in June imposed a foreign travel ban on former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and two former military intelligence officers in connection with the investigation.
HRW said progress elsewhere remained virtually nonexistent. No one has been arrested over the 2006 killing of five Tamil students or the massacre that year of 17 employees, mostly Tamils, of French humanitarian organization Action Contre la Faim.
Questions also persist over mass graves. Investigators have recovered remains of 582 people from a site at Chemmani near Jaffna, but HRW said there had been no apparent progress in identifying them or determining how they died.
The organization also criticized Colombo for refusing to cooperate with the UN-backed Sri Lanka Accountability Project, which collects evidence of serious abuses, and for failing to establish a promised independent Directorate of Public Prosecution.
UN investigations have previously documented extensive alleged war crimes and other abuses by both government forces and Tamil separatists.
HRW urged UN member states to increase pressure on Sri Lanka at the Human Rights Council to turn renewed investigations into prosecutions and end decades of impunity.
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