Tamil girls maintain portraits of their lacking kin throughout a protest demanding justice for the disappeared family members close to the Chemmani mass graves within the former battle zone of Jaffna. File
| Picture Credit score: AFP
Sri Lanka must do extra to guard human rights, advance accountability, and finish the “lengthy legacy of impunity”, the United Nations Human Rights chief has stated.
The Workplace of the Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights, in its newest report on Sri Lanka launched on Thursday (September 3, 2026), stated the federal government “has continued to denounce racism and promote nationwide unity”, however “wider efforts to make sure fact and justice threat being stalled and the momentum for transformative change being misplaced”.
The report, launched forward of the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva starting subsequent week, comes at the same time as President Anura Kumara Dissanayake completes two years in workplace, after a historic mandate, together with from the island nation’s ethnic minorities.
Inspecting his authorities’s pre-election pledges and commitments made throughout UN High Commissioner Volker Türk’s visit to Sri Lanka in June 2025, the report acknowledged the federal government’s “notable steps” to deal with corruption, high-profile arrests and police-led investigations into sure political killings, enforced disappearances, and the 2019 Easter Sunday assaults. Nonetheless, it noticed “significant progress” stays “largely absent” in relation to accountability for worldwide crimes allegedly dedicated by each State safety forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam through the practically three decade-long armed battle.
Simply forward of his election in September 2024, Mr. Dissanayake informed The Hindu in an interview that fixing Sri Lanka’s crisis-hit economic system — the island defaulted on its debt in 2022 — and wiping out racism could be “prime priorities” for his Nationwide Folks’s Energy (NPP) authorities. Opting to proceed with an ongoing Worldwide Financial Fund programme, which imposed crushing austerity measures, President Dissanayake’s authorities has maintained that financial restoration would stay its precedence.
In the meantime, because the UN report famous, successive exterior shocks, together with unilateral commerce measures, the devastating Cyclone Ditwah of 2025, and spillovers from conflicts in West Asia, have additional affected the native economic system and other people’s dwelling requirements.
Recalling the NPP’s election promise to introduce a brand new structure that ‘ensures equality, democracy and the devolution of political and administrative energy to each native Authorities, district and province’, the report pointed to the Provincial Council elections which might be pending for over a decade.
Additional, the report highlighted the NPP’s pledge to repeal the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and urged the federal government to impose a moratorium on the laws, expedite its repeal, and be sure that any alternative laws complies with worldwide human rights regulation. “The Authorities continued to use the PTA, leading to arbitrary arrests and extended detentions with out cost,” it stated, including that the Excessive Commissioner’s workplace acquired info from Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Fee on 46 PTA-related detention circumstances in 2025 and 12 circumstances as of March 2026.
‘Combined outcomes’
A current report revealed by world rights monitor Human Rights Watch factors to Sri Lanka’s “lack of will” to prosecute previous abuses. It highlighted the Chemmani mass grave site near Jaffna, the place greater than 580 skeletons have been unearthed to this point, as households of Tamils killed or disappeared through the battle wait to see how the federal government may proceed with the findings on the nation’s largest mass grave.
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Authored by Sri Lankan human rights activist and lawyer Bhavani Fonseka, the report stated the Dissanayake administration had supplied “a gap” to deal with the Chemmani mass grave and another critical worldwide crimes, together with the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, however that “outcomes up to now are blended.” Based mostly on interviews with victims, households of disappeared individuals, activists and attorneys, it stated: “The administration’s encouraging actions are solely first steps, and important limitations to real accountability stay.”
Printed – September 04, 2026 04:43 pm IST
