THE UNHRC, A TOOTHLESS TIGER?

The National People's Power (NPP) government's approach towards the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolutions on Sri Lanka is somewhat different from that of the previous governments.

- M.S.M.Ayub

Governments under Rajapaksas, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, rejected the resolutions brought during their tenure and unsuccessfully sought to defeat them by garnering support from Muslim and African countries, apart from Russia and China.

Sometimes they became a laughingstock in this endeavour, as happened in 2021 when the then Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena argued the resolution of that year, despite it being passed, was a failure, as Sri Lanka had the support of the majority of the council members when the abstentions and votes against the resolution were taken together.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa followed a confrontational approach towards the UNHRC from the beginning. He ignored the 2012 and 2013 UNHRC resolutions, resulting in the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay getting another resolution passed in the council in 2014, which provided for an investigation by her office on the rights violations in Sri Lanka.

The report of the investigation, which was an overall fact-finding process, accused both the armed forces and the LTTE of human rights violations such as abduction and killing of civilians, using children for the armed conflict and endangering civilian life in the war theatre.

It was through another resolution adopted in 2015 during the so-called Yahapalana Government that a mechanism was contemplated for the investigation of individual violations. The government under President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe cosponsored all three resolutions presented in the UNHRC in 2015, 2017 and 2019.