Resolution #9: Protecting Human Rights & Prosecuting Economic Crimes

by Rajan Philips

Sri Lanka is facing its ninth Resolution at the current UNHRC session in Geneva. To be clear, it is not the people of Sri Lanka but the government that is being embarrassed in Geneva year after year. It is because the government shows up every year without doing any of the homework it promises to do. Every year, the resolution gets longer – with new paragraphs added to old ones. In this year of Gotabaya disgrace, a new clause has been added concerning the country’s current economic crisis. That has raised plenty of hackles among self-righteous patriots.

There are also plenty of other Sri Lankans, no less patriotic and not just diaspora Tamils, who are welcoming the new resolution and its reference to the economic crisis and its criminal perpetrators. The resolution itself does not include the words, ‘economic crimes,’ but calls upon the government to investigate and even prosecute “corruption by public and former public officials,” and assures that the Commission “stands ready to assist and support independent, impartial, and transparent efforts in this regard.” What is wrong with that? Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister has a different take.

Addressing the Commission before the 9th Resolution was released, Foreign Minister Ali Sabry took the usual exception to the Acting High Commissioner’s Report for making “extensive reference to economic crimes.” The Minister went on to add that “apart from the ambiguity of the term, it is a matter of concern that such a reference exceeds the mandate of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).”

Back home, the Minister has been taken to task by commentators for being oblivious to the fact that in UN lexicon, human rights – all human rights including economic, social and cultural rights – are “indivisible, interrelated, interdependent and mutually reinforcing.” If anyone thinks women’s rights are excluded, Hillary Clinton famously answered it in Beijing nearly 30 years ago, declaring that “women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights, once and for all.”

Economic Crimes

All rights are one and indivisible, and the violation of each is a crime. Even so, why pick on a small country like Sri Lanka when there is no country in the world where there are no human rights violations or economic crimes. That has been the commonplace grouse among Sri Lankan objectors to what some of them call the “Geneva charade.” But calling it a charade doesn’t solve the problem. You can argue till the cows come home about how and why Sri Lanka got stuck in Geneva, but that will do little to get the country unstuck. It has become an agonizing annual ritual for the country and the yearly escalation in the resolution is a direct result of the government’s inaction during the preceding year.

The Rajapaksa regimes used Geneva as a platform to whip up political support at home. The Ranil (Wickremesinghe)-Mangala (Samaraweera) duo, on the other hand, thought they could find a way out of Geneva simply by co-sponsoring a resolution without any back up action to win public support at home. Both strategies backfired. This year is different. The UNHRC mandarins got an altogether new brief for their drafting of the annual resolution. That brief arose from the vortex of aragalaya protests that quite peacefully ended the presidency of Gotabaya Rajapaksa barely halfway through its elected term.

Minister Sabry can split hairs as much as he wants, but he cannot hide a pumpkin in a plate of rice. Not after aragalaya, and not after the expulsion of Gotabaya Rajapaksa from office. Mr. Sabry cannot deny that there were economic crimes committed by the Gotabaya Government that led to a wholly ‘man made’ economic crisis. Nor can he disagree that the men who made it must be made to answer for their crimes. If he wants UNHRC out of the picture, he should advise his current President to find domestic ways to bring justice to the victims of not only economic crimes, but all crimes committed by the state.

On the external front, the Rajapaksa regimes extended their native cunning methods to play one country against another, not so much for any strategic benefit for the country but for their own nefarious purposes of making money for the family through the machinery of the state. This is the root cause of the country’s over reliance on China for bilateral debt. The Ranil-Mangala duo berated the Rajapaksas for annoying India and alienating the West and played the opposite strategy of wooing the West and India without upsetting China. But the duo was not transparent at home about what they were trying to do abroad and they did not make a concerted effort to persuade a critical mass of the people to get on board with their approach to national reconciliation in general, and the UNHRC in particular.

In the upshot, the resolutions in Geneva kept getting longer, and Sri Lanka’s debt to China kept getting bigger. In Hambantota debt was turned into equity, like water becoming wine, for China. In Port City, again to please China, Ranil Wickremesinghe went back on his election promise to shut the project down, a promise he made without meaning to keep it. When Rajapaksas returned with Gota at the helm, the highway construction robbery resumed in earnest. But a half a billion dollar US (Millennium) grant for road infrastructure was recklessly rejected because there was no room for cuts or commissions. The Colombo Light-Rail project with Japanese funding was stopped by an email from the President’s Secretary to the Transport’s Secretary, with no formal or informal intimation to Japan. Non-organic fertilizers were banned to save foreign exchange while hoping for an organic agricultural miracle. The military President’s select experts had other bright ideas as well. Eliminate taxes to boost the economy and print money to get out of debt. If these are not economic crimes, what are they?

Rude Awakening

The rude awakening came too much, too late, with the tanking of the economy two years after Gota became President and 17 years after the family first took office. Coincidentally, like the 17 year UNP rule earlier. Now, the government suddenly finds itself having to be exceptionally ambidextrous – talking ‘hair cuts’ with the IMF, and splitting hairs at the UNHRC. The kneejerk thinking among patriotic pundits is that the IMF and the UNHRC are in cahoots against Sri Lanka and the Core Group of countries who are navigating the resolution in Geneva are also calling the shots in the IMF in Washington. Udaya Gammanpila is already into speculation that the UNHRC resolution might be tied to economic relief for Sri Lanka, and is baselessly scaremongering by comparing Sri Lanka’s situation to Indonesia and East Timor in 1999. Thankfully, few pay attention to Mr. Gamanpila or the new political outfit – Uttara Lanka Sabhagaya, that he and his former fellow Rajapaksa acolytes have recently launched.

It turns out that the countries that are positively flexible with Sri Lanka on the economic front and debt restructuring are taking a sterner stand over the UNHRC resolution and accountability for human rights and economic crimes. India is charting its own course in Geneva after being the only country to consistently advance forex through weeks and months when Sri Lanka had neither cash nor credit. India is staying clear of the resolution but reading from the old script on devolution and provincial councils. China, on the other hand, is frightfully non-committal on debt write-off or restructuring, but leading the cheers for Sri Lanka in Geneva. Cash or cheers? That should not be the question.

New Unity

There is no need to conflate the debt crisis and Geneva resolutions as some external imposition on Sri Lanka. There is no external conflation, only domestic delusions about it. Even if there is conflation, there is little that any Sri Lankan government can do about. The need is for the government to realize that both are of its own making and that the resolution of both should start with fundamental changes at home. Living with a permanent stalemate in Geneva was possible so long as the economy was limping along. Now with the economy broken, nothing can be fixed until everything is fixed. That is the conflation here – a national necessity for change and not a foreign imposition of burdens.

The President has a busy schedule with far flung funerals – from London to Tokyo. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said that a state funeral can be a good working funeral. The Sri Lankan President must surely be having two good working funerals, one after the other. Hopefully, more so in Tokyo where it needs to be all about debt. The country can wait for their results. Between funerals there is nothing much to write home about. There is endless haggling in parliament as to who knows what about the IMF agreement. Nothing is likely to be sorted out until the President is back to normal work after the working funerals. If you did not notice Sri Lanka has no finance minister to answer these questions. It is all with the President and about the President, no matter who is President.

At the same time, there has been a positive development outside parliament with the starting of a new ‘mobile signature campaign’ for repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The campaign that was initiated by the ITAK in Jaffna on September 10 reached Gall Face last week and was joined by signing opposition MPs, Civil Society activists and even retired public servants. Former defence secretary Austin Fernando was reportedly the first person to start off signing in Colombo. ITAK MPs, Sumanthiran and Rasamanickam were joined by Eran Wickramaratne, Mujibur Rahuman, Hirunika Premachandra, Rauff Hakeem and Tissa Attanayake. There were also social activists Pubudu Jagoda, and Dharmasiri Lankapeli, and Trade Unionist Joseph Stalin. Bringing great poignancy to the occasion was Human Rights Lawyer, Hejaaz Hizbullah, who had been long detained under the PTA for no reason by the Rajapaksa regime.

Sumanthiran struck a note of unity between the north and south in the new campaign for the repeal of an old law that first entered the statue books in 1979, introduced as temporary measure for six months. The bill was challenged by TULF activists as fundamental rights case in the Supreme Court, with Colvin R. de Silva as the lead lawyer. Court challenges meant nothing at that time for a government that had a five sixths majority in parliament. The law was kept in force by every succeeding government despite promises to repeal it. Just like the promise to abolish the executive presidency.

All that President Wickremesinghe has to do now is to start fulfilling the unkept promises of his predecessors. One promise at a time. That will speedily shorten the UNHRC resolution from year to year until there is nothing left. He can do most of it in one year. He could start by repealing the PTA and stop arresting political protesters. That would be a positive change after two working funerals.