Tamil Political Parties Urge UN High Commissioner to Establish International Criminal Justice Mechanism
26-Sep-2025.
Tamil political parties have written a letter to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, urging the establishment of an international criminal justice mechanism to investigate genocide and war crimes committed in Sri Lanka.
The letter, handed over on September 23 to UN Resident Representative in Colombo Mark Andrew France, was also addressed to the UN Secretary-General, the Security Council, and representatives of member states of the UN Human Rights Council.
It bore the signatures of Justice C.V. Vigneswaran, Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam (via Selvaraja Kajendran), Selvam Adaikkalanathan, Dharmalingam Sitharthan, Suresh Premachandran, Murugesu Chandrakumar, and S. Naveendran (Vendan). Signatures collected through a public petition campaign were also attached.
The parties expressed doubt that the Sri Lankan government would conduct the excavation of the mass grave in Chemmani in an impartial manner.
They stressed the need for international monitoring and technical assistance in such excavations. They also insisted that the High Commissioner’s Office must prioritize the establishment of an international criminal justice mechanism to ensure accountability for genocide and war crimes committed in Sri Lanka.
The letter recalled that in the High Commissioner’s recent report on Sri Lanka, ongoing human rights violations had been highlighted, and a call had been made to the government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake to seize this historic opportunity to end violations and establish accountability.
Tamil people, it said, have been subjected to a well-planned genocide for 76 years since independence. Even today, they face genocidal threats and continue to await justice from the international community, while being dissatisfied with the current stance on accountability.
Although Sri Lanka’s human rights situation was discussed at the 60th session of the UN Human Rights Council, the letter urged closer attention to long-standing systemic issues. It pointed out that the 1948 Citizenship Act stripped nearly one million Indian-origin Tamil plantation workers of citizenship, despite opposition by Tamil leaders. It also highlighted that successive Sinhala-majoritarian governments carried out state-sponsored colonization programs, altering the demography of Tamil homeland areas.
In addition, it recalled that state-backed pogroms in 1956, 1958, 1977, and 1983 destroyed Tamil lives and property, forcing many to flee abroad.
Even 16 years after the end of the war, the letter said, new mass graves continue to be discovered, with over 200 skeletons found at Chemmani alone. It further noted that former army corporal Somaratna Rajapakse, convicted in the case of the rape and murder of schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy and her family, had confessed that he could identify further burial sites. This, it argued, was evidence of large-scale war crimes perpetrated by the Sri Lankan military. It stressed the urgent need to preserve such evidence for future investigations.
The Tamil parties declared that the Sri Lankan government cannot be trusted to conduct impartial investigations and that international involvement is essential. They urged that the upcoming Human Rights Council resolution must not give Sri Lanka further time for domestic mechanisms but instead focus on establishing an international process for justice and accountability.
