N. Sathiya Moorthy, in Ceylon Today, 22 August 2025, where the title reads “How Historic is the Opportunity” ... with highlighting being the intervention of The Editor Thuppahi
In what has become the ritualistic report of the UN Human Rights Commissioner to the UNHRC Council of 48-member nations, elected by rotation, incumbent Volker Türk seems to have settled for a credible, independent mechanism to probe Sri Lanka’s war crimes and other allegations of human rights violations. This is in contrast to the decade-plus-long attempts by the ‘international community’ (read: West) to impose an ‘independent, international mechanism’ for the purpose.
Türk was in the country not very long ago, and his draft report, since publicised by his office, urges the Government to ‘seize the historic opportunity, to break with entrenched impunity, implement transformative reforms, and deliver long-overdue justice and accountability for serious violations and abuses committed in the past, including international crimes’. The ‘historic opportunity’ reference may have nothing to do with any structural reforms that he has still recommended, but to the fact of a JVP-NPP dispensation at the helm. He stopped explaining his terminology further.
To be fair to the Government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, Volker Türk has welcomed the Government’s ‘initiative to establish an independent Public Prosecutor’s Office’, and at the same time recommended the establishment of a dedicated judicial mechanism, including an independent special counsel. In effect, the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner (OHRC) at least has given up on the persistent demand for the Government to outsource it all to international experts – meaning experts who are pliable to the political will of the Western nations that still dominate the UNHRC discourses and decisions.
Muted reaction
Interestingly, even the Tamils’ reaction to the Volker report has been muted. The Government can be expected to record its response, which will say nothing, give away nothing, at the bi-annual council session, commencing on 9 September. Of immediate interest is the Government’s response to Volker’s suggestion/demand for a ‘dedicated judicial mechanism, including special counsel’.
Translated, it could well mean the setting up of special courts to hear and fast-track rights violation cases, starting with war crimes, but not exclusively to them. Given the bipolar activities of combining rights violations with the existing criminal jurisprudential system, the idea of a special public prosecutor, if that is what the Volker report implies by the term ‘special counsel’, too, could be considered favourably.
Yet, the resolution-wise expansion of the scope of the probe, going beyond war crimes and accountability issues to include every other rights violation, small and big, individual-centric or conceptual, has diluted the very purpose beyond recognition and acceptance. To some in the Government and outside, the entire UNHRC process has become a cruel joke – played on the nation or the Tamil people or both.
In a way, Volker Türk’s report is a vast improvement on the past demands of UNHRC chiefs and also the council resolutions. Of course, it remains to be seen, what kind of resolution the council will come up with this time, influenced as it is by geopolitical considerations rather than any real concern for human rights violations.
Hammurabi’s Code
This, and this alone, has delayed or even denied ‘justice’ for the war-victimised Tamils in this country. That is even granting the Western interpretations of terms like ‘justice’, ‘transitional justice’ and ‘closure’, which are alien to this part of the world. Here, instead, it is all about helping in healing the wound and hurt, to help put the past behind and begin afresh.
There is no place in it for the ‘Western way’ for ‘transitional justice’ and ‘closure’. In turn, such constructs as an ‘eye for an eye’ borrow from Hammurabi’s Code, pre-dating the Hebrew Bible, parts of which date back to the second century before Christ. Now you know how modern the Western thinking on the subject is.
Yet, there is no denying the need for the Government to meet some of the Tamil demands. Of course, the Chemmani grave-digging has thrown up skeleton after skeleton, and government coroners have declared that they would require billions of rupees to carbon-date each part in the US or another foreign destination.
Can the Tamils use their good offices to impress upon the OHRC to fund the project, if agreeable to the Government? Anyway, that is the kind of international expertise the Türk report seemed to have indicated – for furthering the probe and criminal prosecution to their logical end, but under a constitutionally-mandated domestic scheme.
From the Government’s side, at least this one has claimed that they have acted immediately on the Tamil complaints about one of them being found dead in a local pond after being seen in the company of some Army soldiers. Some soldiers have been arrested, and the Police claim more arrests may follow. If such impartiality is the current Government’s claim, then, it should not shy away from any project that could help identify the Chemmani victims.
Faceless men
Already, some sections of the Tamil media have listed the Army units that were posted in the area during wartime. Some of them have used the Army’s killing and burial of Krishanthi as the reference time, and have been even more specific. As is known, one of the ex-servicemen, Somaratne Rajapakse, jailed for the Krishanthi killing by the local courts, has offered to come up with more details if allowed to speak up before an international probe.
Some Tamil politicians have already held Somaratne’s in-prison safety as a greater responsibility of the State than already. The implication is that those who could now face the music for past killings that they thought had been buried deep enough could want to harm him, silence him. Whoever they be, those faceless men have suddenly found out that they did not bury the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, deep enough.
The question is whether the Government can convince Somaratne, the Tamils and the international community about the advisability of sticking to a domestic probe and judicial mechanisms, now that Rights Chief Türk has indicated as much. Of course, it’s all in the realm of the overall governmental approach to what all Türk has mentioned in his draft report.
Preparing for PC Polls
The unthinking goof-ups that accompanied the hurriedly-called ITAK-sponsored ‘hartal’ in the North and East, demanding the withdrawal of the excessive Armed Forces’ presence from their midst, ended up as a mixed bag at best. Yet, it has brought together many Tamil-speaking parties, including some recent rivals of the ITAK in the North, and also the SLMC and the Upcountry Tamil political front under former minister Mano Ganesan.
Clearly, they are all planning for the much-delayed Provincial Council Elections, which the government Leader of the House, Minister Bimal Rathnayake, has now hinted could well be held in the first half of next year. This, he said, would be followed by the Government’s promised plans to write in a new Constitution that would introduce ‘systems change’, a touchstone of the JVP leader of the ruling NPP coalition.
Clearly, the SLMC wants the ITAK-led SLT parties’ support to win the Chief Minister’s job in the East. The Upcountry Tamil parties, per se, do not have a say in the North, but they need the SLT’s Wellawatte neighbourhood votes in capital Colombo and the Western. Customarily, they have managed to get those seats allotted to them, earlier under the unified UNP, and now, too, under breakaway SJB.
ITAK Parliamentarian, Shanakiyan, has since moved a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament, to have the PC Polls under the old scheme without waiting to modify the same. They formed deliberate attempts by previous governments to delay the poll, where they feared the worst. Shanakiyan now wants his Bill to be adopted by the Government and taken forward. It is anybody’s guess why he has not demanded a debate on his Bill, instead.
https://ceylontoday.lk/2025/08/22/how-historic-is-the-opportunity/
The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com
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SOME PERTINENT REFERENCES…….
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanakiya_Rasamanickam
- https://www.orfonline.org/contributors/n-sathiya-moorthy
- https://muckrack.com/n-sathiya-moorthy
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaratne_Rajapakse
- https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/16/new-sri-lanka-mass-grave-discovery-reopens-old-wounds-for-tamils
- https://thuppahis.com/2025/08/05/chemmani-graves-site-ochcr-finds/
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The mechanisms that enable justice through International agencies are deeply flawed.
The applications they enable are selective and biased – eg. heavy sanctions on Russia but not a peep about Israeli behavior.
Western power can and does shield criminal states from justice.
Looking for redress from a corrupt legal body is moot.
Does it mean anything? The performative process is empty of real justice!