Colombo/Brussels, 20 February 2013: As the UN Human Rights Council prepares to
open its 22nd session next week, the Sri Lankan government has made no
meaningful progress on either reconciliation or accountability and instead has
accelerated the country’s authoritarian turn, with attacks on the judiciary and
political dissent that threaten long-term stability and peace.
Sri Lanka’s Authoritarian Turn:
The Need for International Action, the latest report from the
International Crisis Group, examines the government’s recent consolidation of
power and sets out critical steps for an effective and coordinated
international response.
“The
Rajapaksa government’s politically motivated impeachment of the chief justice
last month reveals both its intolerance of dissent and power sharing and the
weakness of the political opposition”, says Alan Keenan, Crisis Group’s Sri
Lanka Project Director. “By incapacitating the last institutional check on
executive power, the government has crossed a threshold into new and dangerous
terrain. It is threatening prospects for the eventual peaceful transfer of
power through free and fair elections”.
Analysts
and government critics have warned of Sri Lanka’s growing authoritarianism
since the final years of the civil war, but the impeachment has considerably
worsened the situation. The removal of the chief justice completes the
“constitutional coup” initiated in September 2010 by the eighteenth amendment,
which revoked presidential term limits and the independence of government
oversight bodies.
Sri
Lanka is faced with two worsening and interconnected governance crises. The
dismantling of the independent judiciary and other democratic checks on the
executive and military will inevitably feed the growing ethnic tension
resulting from the absence of power sharing and the denial of minority rights.
Both crises have deepened with the government’s refusal to comply with the UN
Human Rights Council (HRC)’s March 2012 resolution on reconciliation and
accountability. While it claims to have implemented many of the recommendations
of its Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) – a key demand of
the HRC – there has in fact been no meaningful progress.
The
government has conducted no credible investigations into allegations of war
crimes, disappearances or other serious human rights violations and has
rejected the LLRC’s recommendations to establish a range of independent
institutions for oversight and investigations. The international community has
a number of tools at its disposal to encourage Colombo to account for the
deaths of up to 40,000 civilians in the final months of the war; to halt the
current trajectory towards authoritarianism; and to build a country for all,
not just some, Sri Lankans. Chief among these are the levers of the UN,
including the HRC, Sri Lanka’s reliance on development assistance and the
prestige of hosting the forthcoming heads of government meeting of the
Commonwealth.
“Strong
international action should begin with Sri Lanka’s immediate referral to the
Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG) and a new resolution from the HRC
calling for concrete, time-bound actions to restore the rule of law,
investigate alleged war crimes and rights abuses, and devolve power to Tamil
and Muslim areas of the north and east”, says Paul Quinn-Judge, Crisis Group’s
Asia Program Director. “Sri Lankans of all ethnicities, who have struggled to
preserve their democracy, deserve stronger international support”.
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