UN Secretary General must use visit to keep pressure on Sri Lankan government over human rights accountability

Ban Ki-moon visits Sri Lanka today for three days. As he prepares to step down as UN Secretary-General this is an opportunity for him to show that his promises that the UN should deliver human rights for “the most vulnerable” are more than an empty diplomatic initiative.

The UN, by Ban’s own admission, catastrophically failed to protect thousands of Sri Lankans at the end of the conflict in 2009. In 2013, partly because of that failure, Ban championed the “Human Rights Up Front” initiative to encourage UN staff to take a “principled stance and act with moral courage on human rights”. Ban’s visit to the country that inspired this agenda is an opportunity for him to lead from the front.

Even though the Sri Lankan government co-sponsored the UN Human Rights Council Resolution in 2015 it has consistently sought to whittle away its commitment to delivering accountability for abuses including torture during and after the conflict. In direct contrast to the agreement struck in Geneva, the President has repeatedly announced that there will be no internationalised justice process, a point which torture survivors in treatment with us have said time and time again is essential to delivering reconciliation and long-term stability in Sri Lanka.

More recently the Presidential Commission to Investigate Complaints Regarding Missing Persons in its final report proposed a scheme of “accountable amnesties” allowing perpetrators of torture and other serious international crimes to buy their way out of justice.

Ban must send a strong message to the Government of Sri Lanka that a failure to address accountability, in line with human rights obligations and in consultation with survivors as promised in Geneva, is unacceptable.

Ann Hannah, International Advocate at Freedom from Torture said:

“The Human Rights Council Resolution on Sri Lanka in 2015 is widely held up as one of the Council’s greatest achievements but to be a true success, Ban needs to use the authority of his office during this visit to help move this political agreement from words to action.

Ban has a responsibility to show survivors that the UN will not fail them again as it did in 2009. We have already documented 248 cases of torture since the end of the conflict, including 17 cases under President Sirisena’s leadership. Without long-term and firm UN support and monitoring it seems likely that accountability processes will stall, torture will continue and peace will be undermined.

If Ban does not convince the Sri Lankan government of the need for full delivery of the resolution, including promises of an internationalised justice process, he is telling survivors from Sri Lanka, and from other conflicts, that when the UN Charter talks about ‘We the peoples’ it doesn’t mean them.”

Follow Ann on Twitter at @avh16 for further comment.