UN rights chief calls for greater action to end Sri Lanka’s ‘long legacy of impunity‘

Sri Lanka needs to do more to protect human rights, advance accountability, and end the “long legacy of impunity”, the United Nations Human Rights chief has said.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in its latest report on Sri Lanka released on Thursday (September 3, 2026), said the government “has continued to denounce racism and promote national unity”, but “wider efforts to ensure truth and justice risk being stalled and the momentum for transformative change being lost”.

The report, released ahead of the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva beginning next week, comes even as President Anura Kumara Dissanayake completes two years in office, after a historic mandate, including from the island nation’s ethnic minorities.

Examining his government’s pre-election pledges and commitments made during UN High Commissioner Volker Türk’s visit to Sri Lanka in June 2025, the report acknowledged the government’s “notable steps” to tackle corruption, high-profile arrests and police-led investigations into certain political killings, enforced disappearances, and the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks. However, it observed “meaningful progress” remains “largely absent” in relation to accountability for international crimes allegedly committed by both State security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the nearly three decade-long armed conflict.

Just ahead of his election in September 2024, Mr. Dissanayake told The Hindu in an interview that fixing Sri Lanka’s crisis-hit economy — the island defaulted on its debt in 2022 — and wiping out racism would be “top priorities” for his National People’s Power (NPP) government. Opting to continue with an ongoing International Monetary Fund programme, which imposed crushing austerity measures, President Dissanayake’s government has maintained that economic recovery would remain its priority.

Meanwhile, as the UN report noted, successive external shocks, including unilateral trade measures, the devastating Cyclone Ditwah of 2025, and spillovers from conflicts in West Asia, have further affected the local economy and people’s living standards.

Recalling the NPP’s election promise to introduce a new constitution that ‘guarantees equality, democracy and the devolution of political and administrative power to every local Government, district and province’, the report pointed to the Provincial Council elections that are pending for over a decade.

Further, the report highlighted the NPP’s pledge to repeal the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and urged the government to impose a moratorium on the legislation, expedite its repeal, and ensure that any replacement legislation complies with international human rights law. “The Government continued to apply the PTA, resulting in arbitrary arrests and prolonged detentions without charge,” it said, adding that the High Commissioner’s office received information from Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission on 46 PTA-related detention cases in 2025 and 12 cases as of March 2026.

‘Mixed results’

A recent report published by global rights monitor Human Rights Watch points to Sri Lanka’s “lack of will” to prosecute past abuses. It highlighted the Chemmani mass grave site near Jaffna, where more than 580 skeletons have been unearthed so far, as families of Tamils killed or disappeared during the war wait to see how the government might proceed with the findings at the country’s largest mass grave.

Also read: A poverty of hope among Sri Lankan Tamils

Authored by Sri Lankan human rights activist and lawyer Bhavani Fonseka, the report said the Dissanayake administration had provided “an opening” to address the Chemmani mass grave and some other serious international crimes, including the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, but that “results to date are mixed.” Based on interviews with victims, families of disappeared persons, activists and lawyers, it said: “The administration’s encouraging actions are only first steps, and significant barriers to genuine accountability remain.”