Himal: Yasmin Sooka on Truth and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka

State of Southasia #18

Himal, Colombo, February 16, 2025

A conversation on the failed attempts at accountability and reconciliation in Sri Lanka and hopes from the country’s new political dispensation for movement towards transitional justice. The Editors

In December, the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), an international non-government organisation working to promote justice and accountability in Sri Lanka after its civil war, announced that it had in recent years submitted more than 60 sanction and travel ban requests against Sri Lankan officials and security personnel for alleged human rights violations committed during the country’s decades-long armed conflict and after it. The ITJP has sent these requests to countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the European Union and also the United Nations.

The requests are based on the ITJP’s extensive documentation of violations that include extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, torture, and sexual violence. The people who the ITJP has requested sanctions against had various roles to play in these abuses and belong to the Sri Lankan military forces, paramilitary groups, civil servants – including judges and former government ministers – and also former members of the Indian Peace Keeping Force.

In this episode of State of Southasia, Yasmin Sooka, a human rights lawyer and the executive director of the ITJP, speaks to Nayantara Narayanan about the sanction requests, the importance of accountability and reconciliation in Sri Lanka and her hopes from the country’s new political dispensation that there will be some movement towards transitional justice.

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A memorial event in May 2023 for Tamil civilian victims of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Sri Lanka’s many internal commissions of inquiry have failed to hold perpetrators of human rights violations during and after the war accountable.IMAGO/NurPhoto

Episode notes

Yasmin Sooka’s recommendations

No Fire Zone: In the killing fields of Sri Lanka by Callum Macrae (documentary film)

Muttrupulliya by Sherine Xavier (documentary film)

Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War by Frances Harrison (non-fiction)

Truth Commission: Special report broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (televised series)

Further reading from Himal’s archives:

Anatomy of a murder investigation – the Lasantha Wickrematunge case

The wait for justice for Nimalarajan Mylvaganam, murdered Jaffna journalist

The devastating poetry of Tamil women who fought in Sri Lanka’s civil war

The long wait for justice: On the chronic failures of criminal justice in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s complex dance of Sinhala and Tamil nationalist politics