UN Report’s Acceptance Of A Hybrid Tribunal Is Flawed: ICPPG
September 20, 2015
“The Sri Lankan Government’s proposal of a domestic tribunal or as an offer of compromise to the international community, a hybrid tribunal, will not secure the aims that the Human Rights Commissioner has stated. The Report’s acceptance of a hybrid tribunal having both domestic and external judges is flawed.” the Centre for the Prosecution and Prevention of Genocide said in a statement.
ICPPG Head Professor M Sornarajah
Welcoming the Report of the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner’s Investigation on Sri Lanka (OISL), the Centre for the Prosecution and Prevention of Genocide (CPPG) called for an international tribunal to investigate the allegations of war crimes during Sri Lanka’s civil war.
We publish below the statement in full;
The Centre for the Prosecution and Prevention of Genocide welcomes the Report of the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner’s Investigation on Sri Lanka (OISL). The Report contains serious allegations of a full range of heinous international crimes committed by the Sri Lankan armed forces. The OISL Report provides easy means of identification of the perpetrators of these crimes. On existing theories of international criminal law relating to command responsibility and joint criminal enterprise, there is little room for doubt that the commanders on the field as well as operational commanders have responsibility for these crimes. The President of Sri Lanka at that time, Mahinda Rajapaksa, being the supreme commander of the armed forces, bears direct command responsibility. The operational and field commanders are also easily identifiable. Many of them are named. Some names appear frequently in the Report. All of them have command responsibility and were possibly engaged in a joint criminal enterprise.
The thoroughness of the Report is admirable. There is need for the Report to be followed up by the institution of proper mechanisms ensuring accountability.
In anticipation of the release of the Report, the High Commissioner had already stated that the OISL’s “findings are of the most serious nature”. (Speech of High Commissioner at the Opening Session of the Human Rights Council on 14 September, 2015). He promised to make his recommendations after releasing the Report. In his speech he said: “..this Council owes it to Sri Lankans-and to its own credibility- to ensure an accountability process that produces results, decisively moves beyond the failures of the past, and brings the deep institutional changes needed to guarantee non-recurrence”. Equally importantly, the Centre believes that if there is no meaningful prosecution of the crimes, it would set-back to the international community as a whole. A link in the precedents that meaningful prosecutions will follow the violations of serious international crimes will be severed. An excellent Report, the first of its kind, stating with authority the whole episode in history in the context of international humanitarian law will go waste if meaningful follow-up action is not taken.
