Colombo/Brussels | 20 Feb 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”.
