Sri Lankan authorities have been accused of allowing continuing human rights abuses, including torture and illegal detention, exactly one year after Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena took power on a reforming ticket.
International campaigners said they documented 27 individual cases of serious human rights abuses occurring in the last 12 months. Freedom from Torture, a UK-based organization offering medical aid to survivors of torture, said it had been involved with eight cases.
The victim in each was from Sri Lanka’s largely Hindu Tamil minority and the alleged perpetrators were members of the intelligence services or military, which are dominated by the nation’s largely Buddhist Sinhala majority.
Sri Lanka suffered a crippling 26-year civil war pitting government forces against violent Tamil separatist extremists of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) which ended in a series of bloody battles in 2009.
Sonya Sceats, director of policy and advocacy for Freedom from Torture, said Sirisena’s repeated recognition that reconciliation in his nation required accountability for serious human rights abuses was a welcome change.
“But having set a new tone, the president must match his rhetoric with a clear blueprint for rooting out torture from Sri Lanka’s security sector and putting perpetrators on trial, no matter how powerful they may be,” she said.
“Sadly, it’s very much business as usual,” said Yasmin Sooka, of the International Truth and Justice Project.
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