The panel of experts appointed by UN Secretary General to study the final months of Sri Lanka’s civil war today urged the UN Human Rights Council to support a formal investigation the UN’s human rights chief, Navi Pillay, into the violations of international law by both sides they had identified.

The experts, Marzuki Darusman (former attorney-general of Indonesia), Steven Ratner (law professor at the University of Michigan) and Yasmin Sooka (executive director of the Foundation for Human Rights in South Africa), said in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail:

“While not as formal as a freestanding commission of inquiry like that for Syria, this mechanism could finally provide the independent investigation that is long overdue. It will need a budget and staff sufficient to the challenge of investigating the events of 2009.

“Sri Lanka has deployed its diplomats worldwide to try to persuade the developing states on the Council that an investigation by the UN is an attack on Sri Lankan sovereignty. But Sri Lanka has agreed to all the human rights standards that the UN investigation will apply. And a UN inquiry will ascertain the facts without prejudice.

“Members of the Council should give the UN investigation not only their vote, but the financial support it will need to carry out a careful inquiry.

“With such a record, the denial by the government and LTTE sympathizers can finally be addressed, and the task of justice for Sri Lanka’s victims can enter a new stage.”

The experts said their own report three years ago had recommended that the Sri Lankan government investigate war crimes and that the UN step in with its own international investigation if the government failed to do so.

However, “while our report garnered support within Sri Lankan civil society and abroad, the government rejected it as a sort of plot by LTTE sympathizers,” they said.

They pointed out that subsequent calls for Sri Lanka to conduct an independent investigation in the UNHRC resolutions of 2012 and 2013, and again last year by High Commissioner Pillay, had not been heeded.

“Meanwhile, the human rights situation continues to deteriorate, as opponents and journalists disappear, the Tamil areas in the north remain highly militarized, survivors live in fear, and many missing from the war remain unaccounted for.”

Referring to the possibility of reconciliation through a truth commission, the experts said:

“The peace in Sri Lanka about which the government brags is based on conquest and fear. It could not be more the opposite of the peace based on truth, justice, and reconciliation that Nelson Mandela insisted upon for South Africa; and the fate of those two states could also not be more divergent.”