The Tamil National People’s Front has stressed the need for a criminal judicial process following the findings of the OISL report.
Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, the party’s leader Gajen Ponnambalam welcomed the report’s finding that a domestic investigation mechanism would not suffice.
Mr Ponnambalam said that while the report stresses that it was a human rights investigation and not a criminal one, the stance of Tamil war victims was still that a criminal inquiry must lead to prosecutions for war criminals.
The OISL’s suggestions for a hybrid mechanism were also ambiguous, Mr Ponnambalam said, maintaining that domestic structures could play no part in future accountability mechanisms for the same reasons that a domestic mechanism was rejected by the OISL.
Until the specifics of a hybrid mechanism are made clear, the TNPF will maintain their default position for an international investigation, Mr Ponnambalam said.
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