Ananthi, North East Disappearances Committees Seek UN Monitored Investigation Into Enforced Disappearances In Sri Lanka
January 20, 2014
Northern Provincial Councillor and Tamil National Alliance Member Ananthi Sasitharan has written to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay expressing mistrust in local mechanisms to address enforced disappearances and seeking a UN monitored international inquiry into forced disappearances and abductions.
Tamil National Alliance Member Ananthi Sasitharan
Writing on behalf of the Disappearances Committees of the North and East, Sasitharan says at least four official truth seeking commissions had failed the survivors with some of them even failing to make their findings public. “We previously had two commissions established by the then Presidents, respectively in 1995 and 1998, to investigate forced disappearances which received around 30 000 complaints. Today 10,136 of the 30 000 complaints remained un-investigated,” Sasitharan said in her letter to Pillay via the local UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Colombo dated 20 January 2014.
“We also feel that “successive governments continued to use abductions and disappearances of persons as a convenient method of dealing with dissent or with those who become a thorn in their thorn in their sides” The interdicted were reinstated and often reassigned to the same duty stations from which they carried out abuses, thereby causing much distress to former victims,” Sasitharan’s letter said.
Explaining their distrust of the local mechanism, Sasitharan observes that Sri Lanka has no witness protection programme. “The lack of effective protection for witnesses against intimidation has been a very serious obstacle to the prosecution of human rights cases, and obstructs the work of any Commission of Inquiry by inhibiting witnesses and potential whistle-blowers. A bill to establish a rudimentary witness protection system in Sri Lanka has been stalled since June 2006,” her letter to Pillay said.
The current exercise to look into disappearances was just an attempt by the Government to buy time before the UNHRC Sessions in March 2014, Sasitharan notes, adding that the Disappearances Committees of the North and East strongly support an International independent UN working group to investigate enforced disappearances and abductions.
[1] M.C.M. Iqbal, ‘Disappearances Commissions of Sri Lanka: A Commentary on Certain Aspects of Their Reports’ Voice, October, 2002
[3] Ilias Bantekas and Lutz Oette, International Human Rights Law and Practice, Cambridge University, 2013, p. 358
[4] M.C.M.Iqbal.
[5] Romesh Silva, Britto Fernando and Vasuki Nesiah, Clarifying the Past and Commemorating Sri Lanka’s Disappeared; A Descriptive Analysis of Enforced Disappearances Documented by Families of the Disappeared, Colombo: Families of the Disappeared/Human Rights Data Analysis Group, Benetech/International Center for Transitional Jusitce, 2007
