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Sri Lanka Parliament. File.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
Sri Lanka’s Parliament will debate a nearly three-decade-old report probing allegations of unlawful detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings by the State between 1988 and 1990, the ruling National People’s Power [NPP] government has said.
Leader of the House Bimal Rathnayake on Friday (March 14, 2025) tabled the report in the Parliament and said the government would seek the Attorney General’s opinion on it. The report came into focus recently, following Doha-headquartered television channel Al Jazeera’s interview with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, in which he was asked about torture allegations during the period. Mr. Wickremesinghe — who was Minister of Industries in President Ranaginshe Premadasa’s government at the time was accused of enabling the “torture camp” — denied any wrongdoing.
The ambit of the report, in the late 1990s, covers the period of the second armed insurrection of the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna [JVP], which is the chief constituent of the ruling NPP coalition. The ‘Batalanda commission report’, released in 1998 by a panel appointed by former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, investigated serious allegations of torture, targeting members of or those allegedly linked to the JVP, which had taken up arms [for the second time], against the State, its representatives, government supporters, and dissidents from the Left, as it resisted the Premadasa government’s policies. According to multiple accounts of the period, the state responded brutally.
Also read: Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna: From underground to government
The ‘Batalanda commission report’ pertains to a government-backed counter-subversive unit, or the ‘Batalanda detention centre’, run in Colombo’s neighbouring Gampaha district, as part of the state’s operation to put down the insurgency. The report, which details the violence committed by the JVP, notes, “The terrorism of the JVP was met with State Terrorism”.
The renewed attention to the 1998 report has generated interest within Sri Lanka’s human rights community that has repeatedly cited impunity for state actors as the main impediment to justice, with activists reminding successive governments of the many calls for justice from the Tamil community that witnessed gross human rights violations during the civil war.
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Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena, constitutional lawyer and author of ‘Commissions of Inquiry; Still Seeking Justice in Sri Lanka’ said the significance [of tabling or debating the report] lies not in the “political sound and fury”, but in the possible legal action on its findings. “Will that [parliamentary] debate be used for political capital by the government? That will only continue an entrenched pattern of politicised use of Commissions of Inquiry reports. On the other hand, if we talk of ‘JVP terrorism’ and ‘state terrorism’, this debate should include other Commissions of Inquiry reports that comprehensively dealt with state and counter-state terror from the north to the south during the 1980s”, she said.
The focus, Ms. Pinto-Jayawardena contended, should be ensuring systemic accountability in properly enforcing the criminal justice system. “The effort should not be limited to a politician who happens to be an opponent of the government or to one commission report.”
With regard to legal implications, she pointed to a 2008 amendment to Sri Lanka’s Commissions of Inquiry Act (1948) by which the AG has the discretion to institute criminal proceedings in a court of law in respect of any offence, based on material collected during the course of an investigation or inquiry. “This was a hard-won victory by civil society activists. It remains to be seen if this amendment can be applied retrospectively…where criminal justice is concerned, we badly need to apply the doctrine of command responsibility effectively. Certainly on that and in other respects, the Batalanda Report may afford some scope for proceeding further, but the AG will have an unenviable task of meeting the requisite standard of the criminal law,” Ms. Pinto-Jayawardena said.
According to Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri, Professor of History at the University of Colombo, the government would not have tabled the report in Parliament but for pressure following Mr. Wickremesinghe’s recent media interview, but he sees value in creating a public discourse around the report. “It would be ideal to set up a credible Truth Commission to investigate the role of the State in the past, not just in the south but also in the north.” In his view, bringing perpetrators to book appears less realistic given there are “wheels within wheels”, and it is hard to prove [perpetrators’] responsibility in a court of law [in all cases]. “But it is very important for us to know how exactly the state worked, how it used counter-insurgency measures in the past, whether it was against the JVP or the LTTE, because those structures are still embedded in our state apparatus,” Prof. Dewasiri said.
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Published – March 15, 2025 05:36 pm IST
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Sri Lankan Parliament to debate report on JVP-era ‘torture camp’
