The Limits of Geneva

Illustration by Keera Ratnam.The reports presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva have become a familiar feature of the struggle to account for the atrocities committed on the island, and last week’s was no exception. Nearly two years into the administration of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the Office of the High Commissioner acknowledged that investigations into crimes under international law committed during the armed conflict have gone nowhere. Security sector reform has not happened, and personnel credibly suspected of grave violations remain in place within the military and the police. Victims, families of the disappeared and human rights defenders continue to be intimidated by state intelligence services, whilst the Prevention of Terrorism Act is still being used to arrest people and hold them without charge.

None of this should surprise anyone who has followed the ritual. A year ago the Council passed resolution 60/1 and handed Colombo more time, as every resolution has done since 2015, on the reasoning that a new government deserved the opportunity to prove itself. The report published this week is the account of what was done with that opportunity. Colombo’s answer was to parrot the language of previous regimes, rejecting the UN’s external evidence-gathering mechanism and arguing instead for a pathway towards the termination of scrutiny.

What the NPP has demonstrated over two years is that it will spend whatever goodwill the international community extends to it and deliver no structural change on accountability in return. That places the burden where it has always belonged, on the states that lead scrutiny of Sri Lanka and keep insisting that the domestic route remains open.

This paper has argued for years that action has to extend beyond the Human Rights Council. A decade of reports and resolutions has produced no prosecutions for the wartime atrocities, no meaningful security sector reform and no answers for families who still do not know whether their relatives are amongst those being lifted out of the ground at Chemmani. The Core Group statement acknowledged that the mass graves stand as a “stark reminder” of thousands of unresolved disappearances. But then inexplicably arrived at the same prescription as every statement before it, placing the onus on Colombo to act.

Hours later, and a few thousand miles away, the same British government showed the House of Commons what it does when it decides that a state’s conduct requires more than disapproval.

Ed Miliband told MPs that Britain now accepts the International Court of Justice’s finding that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is unlawful in its entirety, and that the unlawfulness “should be reflected in the economic relationships we choose to have with the occupied territories”. He announced an import ban on goods from the settlements, a comprehensive sanctions regime covering companies and individuals who finance, construct or provide services for settlement expansion, a prohibition on advertising settlement property in Britain, further designations against extremist settlers, and the refusal of export licences for anything materially contributing to the occupation. Israel responded by ordering the British consulate in Jerusalem to close. The measures went ahead regardless, and Miliband made clear Britain could not stand by because it feared the reaction.

Set that against Sri Lanka and the British position becomes difficult to defend on any consistent principle. Britain cannot argue that stronger instruments are unavailable, because it has just deployed them against a government it has spent decades calling an ally. It cannot argue that sanctions are inappropriate in the Sri Lankan case, because it accepted the opposite in March 2025, when it designated Shavendra Silva, Jagath Jayasuriya, Wasantha Karannagoda and the paramilitary leader Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan. Eighteen months on, the list still runs to those four names. The institutions that employed these men, and that continue to occupy the North-East, have faced no comparable consequences.

The framework Miliband set out in the Commons has an obvious application here. Britain could examine the military-run enterprises and state entities that sustain the occupation of Tamil land, and ask whether British money should flow towards them. It could look at the officers still serving in commands implicated in atrocities. The High Commissioner’s report, produced under a mandate Britain helped secure, explicitly urges states to use extraterritorial and universal jurisdiction and to explore further measures against those credibly alleged to be responsible. Trade sits in the same category. Sri Lanka holds Enhanced Preferences under Britain’s Developing Countries Trading Scheme, giving it zero tariffs on more than ninety-two per cent of product lines, and in January this year Britain liberalised the rules of origin so that Sri Lankan manufacturers can source materials anywhere in the world and keep duty-free access to the British market. Garments alone account for around US$675 million a year.

Britain has decided in one case that unlawfulness should shape economic relationships. In the other it has made the relationship more generous and asked for nothing. Further UN reports or resolutions will not alter Colombo’s calculations. Sri Lanka has long understood that these can be absorbed or simply ignored. The pattern only breaks when compliance becomes cheaper than defiance.

Britain showed this week that it knows how to change that arithmetic, and that it is willing to bear the diplomatic cost of doing so. It should now do the same for Sri Lanka.
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^{Illustration by Keera Ratnam.}