The Limits of International Engagement in Human Rights Situations: the Case of Sri Lanka

Abstract

The limits of international engagement in situations where rights are in question is a pressing topic in many parts of the world. Sri Lanka is an urgent example of a country in need of mending its dismal rights record and poor reputation in the matter. A 2002 cease fire between the forces of the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LITE) gave way in February 2008 to outright civil war. By March 2009, the LITE appeared to be essentially defeated as a conventional army in the field, but a remnant hung on, cornered in a small enclave at the Nanthi ICadal lagoon in the Northern Province, holding as a human shield as many as 150,000 Ceylon Tamil civilians in order to dissuade an all-out heavy weapons assault by the Sri Lankan army.1 But on 17 May, the LITE forces finally surrendered after their venerated leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed in action. This brought to an end an LTTE quasi-separate state that had been in place for 15 years in parts of the Northern Province. The civil war came at a huge cost of life (estimates of 70,000 victims) and treasure (latterly, the financial burden of US$1.6 billion per year in defence expenditure, to say nothing of the fortune contributed to the Eelam cause from an extensive diaspora over a period of 25 years). The war has also seen a serious diminishment of civil and rights everywhere in Sri Lanka. Even in Colombo and other southern locations far from the war zone, there has been an exponential rise in extra-judicial killings, illegal arrests, unlawful detentions, abductions and assassinations of innocent people?-some perpetrated by the LTTE, others associated with the armed forces and police. Civil society everywhere has suffered, and a palpable anxiety has deeply spread into all of