Reports and hypocrisy

Thursday 11th March, 2021

Many are those who flay the western bloc for duplicity anent its handling of human rights issues. The West, in fact, deserves such criticism in that the powerful nations in the Global North are unashamedly using democracy as a weapon to further their geo-strategic interests; they manipulate the UN, especially the UNHRC, and international human rights groups, dependent on them for funding, and have damning reports put out so that they can carry out their human rights offensives, as it were, to tame the nations that refuse to follow their diktats. These self-proclaimed crusaders for democracy have no qualms about defending the worst human rights violators, who are their allies. The reports upon which their efforts to penalise nations for alleged human rights violations are based lack transparency and credibility. But is it only the western powers that are guilty of this kind of duplicity?

The incumbent Sri Lankan government (GoSL), which has rightly taken exception to the UNHRC resolution to be moved against Sri Lanka in Geneva, stands accused of having done what it inveighs against the UN for—creating a wall of secrecy concerning vital probe reports.

The UNHRC resolutions against Sri Lanka have stemmed from a report prepared by a panel of ‘experts’ the then UN Secretary General (UNSG) Ban Ki-moon appointed soon after the conclusion of Sri Lanka’s war in 2009. The report, issued in 2011, is mostly based on what some unnamed witnesses purportedly told the ‘experts’. The identities of these witnesses will not be disclosed for more than two decades, but the UNHRC wants a war crimes probe conducted on the basis of what they are said to have revealed!

Moreover, the prime movers in crafting the anti-Sri Lanka resolutions at the UNHRC are the US and the UK. Both these countries have got badly exposed for falsifying intelligence reports; they manufactured evidence of weapons of mass destruction to launch their illegal war for oil against Iraq, where they committed countless crimes with impunity.

Now, the GoSL has drawn fire for refusing to share with the country’s Attorney General (AG) some vital information contained in a report submitted by a Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI) that probed the Easter Sunday attacks. The AG has received only 65 out of 87 volumes of the report. The government has sought to justify its decision to withhold the 22 volumes by claiming that they contain sensitive information pertaining to national security, and the PCoI has advised it not to submit them even to the AG! How can the GoSL fault the UN for withholding information as regards the ‘expert’ panel’s report?

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Sri Lanka has urged the government to submit all volumes of the PCoI report to the state prosecutor, who is required to initiate legal action against those named therein. One cannot but agree with the prelates. Some testimonies were made before the commission in camera, and nobody other than the good commissioners, the President, and perhaps a few officials, is privy to them. The report cannot be properly understood without the perusal of all its volumes. There is no way the AG can file action based only on the recommendations in the report without a proper understanding of the information that is said to underpin them; he cannot be expected to build strong criminal cases on a foundation of sand. What he is required to perform is not akin to keyhole surgery, as we argued in a previous comment; he has to adopt a holistic approach to the commission report, or the defence counsel will demolish his arguments like clay pots in courts.

The UNP and its offshoot, the SJB, have also demonstrated their hypocrisy, albeit unwittingly. They have called for the release of all volumes of the PCoI report on the Easter Sunday carnage. They have flayed the government for keeping some information under wraps. But the notables of these parties readily co-sponsored a UNHRC resolution based on the UNSG’s expert panel report tainted by secrecy. They did not demand that evidence ‘supporting’ the conclusions in the UN report be made public, did they?

Transparency is a prerequisite for ensuring the credibility of probe reports. Shouldn’t the GoSL care to conduct its affairs in a transparent and credible manner before remonstrating with the UN and the West?