Even as Sri Lanka’s human rights condition is being assessed at the annual United Nations Human Rights Council sessions in Geneva, Switzerland, the President and the Prime Minister have made public statements rejecting the formal role of foreign judges on the benches of Sri Lankan courts. Both, the timing of the statements vis-à-vis Geneva and, the fact that both top national leaders have simultaneously made such a pronouncement is of great significance.
The President’s statement has a nationalist element that, perhaps, befits the role of the head of state and first citizen of the country. The Prime Minister, as head of government, naturally presents a technical rationale that addresses the institutional mechanics of the issue.
President Sirisena, as the elected defender of the nation and final spokesperson to the world, paradoxically chose a platform within his own political party to make this statement of profound importance to the country’s international position. Perhaps, he was unequivocally embedding this matter of international importance within the fabric of national politics.
Prime Minister Wickremesinghe used his own professional authority as a lawyer to discuss the technicalities of the issue at the principal national forum of lawyers, thereby attempting to make the same case in technical terms of the country’s already mature – if temporarily disrupted – judicial system and legal discourse.
The dimensions of both, national politics as well as that of the necessary institutional and moral justification are of equal importance to any nation that values propriety together with dignity.
Sri Lanka has been rightly hauled up before the ultimate international forum, the UN, for its disgraceful record of violating the rights of its own people. For some years, the country’s official leadership, namely the previous regime, cynically denied such violations even as that regime was often caught with its pants down in denial. That government’s official representatives in Geneva indulged in intellectual gymnastics (even resorting to the idiom of revolutionary heroes to cultivate South American states) in efforts to cover up its misdemeanours.
That patent duplicity was shamefully exposed by brave Sri Lankans themselves who risked life and limb, literally, to travel to Geneva and give their side of the story. What counted in Geneva at the time were not so much the nationalistic testimonies of foreign-based minority ethnic activists (only some of whom were Sri Lankan born).
The more credible testimonies were by those who emerged from the authoritarian maelstrom here to testify irrespective of ethnic loyalties and, most significantly, highlighting the spectrum of violations that encompassed victims of both, racism as well as mis-governance and political repression.
The regime change that occurred in 2015 was only possible because the leaders of that change honestly acknowledged the scale of the violations all round – irrespective of ethnicity - and won the support of all those who struggled for democracy and social justice. The program of post-war Reconciliation, therefore, is not about merely redressing the woes of ethnic minorities but about addressing the pain of all victims of the war from among all ethnic groups and also not limited to ethnic-based victimisation.
In any case, the Geneva process is not simply about inter-ethnic reconciliation at all. It is about the repair and revival of Sri Lankan democracy and proper governance.
Of course, the Sri Lankan people as well as the international community has realised that the fulfilment of those commitments to ‘do good’ is not as easy or as quick as voicing such commitments. In the first place the creatures who led the way for change are themselves creatures of the mess itself. Many of them had fingers in the pies of repression, racism and corruption to varying degrees at various points in our more recent political history.
The UNP and SLFP as well as some of the smaller political parties have been in governmental power at points when repression occurred or racism was entrenched. The reactive insurgent forces, themselves the initiators of terrifying war-lordism and ethnic cleansing in most brutal ways, only added to the awful mix that cannot be redressed in just two years.
We have seen how, despite the prosecution of past repression and atrocity, similar acts have continued to occur, although at significantly less frequency and never as severe. The citizenry is beginning to lose its patience over emerging evidence of corruption and even some nepotism. The only comfort that citizens can give themselves is that other actors in society, namely the civil rights and social justice community as well as the news media, no longer function in fear of their lives and very quickly highlight such instances of mis-governance and repression.
The UN authorities have rightly pointed out these small victories of justice and democracy and acknowledged the changes achieved by the change-makers who won power in 2015.
Prime Minister Wickremesinghe was right, therefore, to argue that those conditions that justified the requirement by the Human Rights Council for a role for foreign judicial experts now no longer exist. Some social justice activists within the country, however, would also be right to challenge the Government to prove the worth of this argument by more and quicker action on all fronts of democratisation.
There are indications that Geneva is listening to the pleas of Colombo today, primarily because there is a more honest and transparent regime here that is ready, in a manner that befits our civilisation, to acknowledge the wrongs of both, the past and the present. What is needed to further evidence that honesty is not further rhetoric nor showpiece actions of limited results.
Institutions such as the Office of Missing Persons and Office of National Unity and Reconciliation cannot be places with little more than name boards and budgets for meetings. Only sizeable allocations that are similar to the budgets of far less important but lavish programs will convince the citizenry as well as the international community that repression, racism and corruption is genuinely on the way out.
Only this will justify the non-inclusion of foreign judges in our repair of democracy.