Questioning the Answers
More than sixteen years after Sri Lanka declared its civil war over, the country is still unwilling to confront one of its most corrosive legacies: the systematic use of sexual violence during and after the conflict—and the enduring architecture of impunity that followed it.
A recent report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rightsdoes not introduce new allegations. What it does—quietly, methodically, and devastatingly—is confirm what has long been documented, denied, minimised, or politically postponed: that conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) was not incidental, not rogue, and not rare. It was deliberate, widespread, and institutionally enabled.
The report, tellingly titled “We Lost Everything – Even Hope for Justice,” draws on over a decade of UN monitoring, prior investigations, and direct survivor consultations. Its conclusions are careful, but unmistakable. Sexual violence—including rape, gang rape, sexual torture, forced nudity, genital mutilation, and humiliation—was used as a tool of control, punishment, interrogation, and intimidation, disproportionately targeting Tamil communities.
Perpetrators, according to the report, were primarily state actors: members of the armed forces, intelligence services, police units including the CID and TID, and affiliated paramilitary groups.
This matters, because accountability for CRSV is not a question of individual pathology—it is a question of command responsibility, institutional tolerance, and political will.
On that front, Sri Lanka’s record remains bleak.
Successive governments, the report notes, have failed to adequately investigate or prosecute CRSV cases, often disputing the scale of violations or treating them as aberrations rather than symptoms of a deeper failure of civilian oversight. International concern has been plentiful. Domestic accountability has not.
The current administration has promised better. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, in his inaugural address in November 2024, pledged to investigate controversial crimes, restore trust in the rule of law, and deliver justice to victims. Those words were welcomed. Fifteen months later, the report concludes, tangible progress remains elusive. The conditions that enabled abuse—emergency laws, militarisation, weak prosecutorial independence, and structural impunity— remain largely intact.
What distinguishes this report is its survivor-centred methodology. Restricted access to Sri Lanka meant that the OHCHR conducted confidential remote interviews and focus groups with 27 survivors—women and men, aged between 26 and 86—documenting abuse spanning nearly four decades, from 1985 to as recently as 2024.
Their testimonies are devastating not because they are graphic, but because they are consistent.
“This is a torture that never stops,” one woman said. Another put it more starkly: “We lost everything—our husbands, our children, our dignity.” A male survivor reflected simply: “I was happy to be alive, and that was enough.”
Many spoke not just of personal harm, but of collective injury. Sexual violence, they said, was used to strip dignity from an entire community.
The report also traces how impunity during wartime has bled into peacetime. Continued militarisation in the North and East, the operation of laws such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and the erosion of judicial independence have sustained a continuum of gender-based violence.
Stigma compounds the harm: women face ostracism and economic exclusion; men face silence, emasculation, and untreated injuries; children— including those born of rape—carry inherited discrimination.
Legal redress remains rare. Even emblematic cases, such as the 2011 Vishvamadu gang rape, have collapsed on appeal. Reparations are virtually nonexistent. There has been no comprehensive acknowledgment, let alone apology.
The OHCHR’s recommendations are not radical. They are remedial: public acknowledgment of past violations by state forces; survivor-centred investigations including command responsibility; legal reform, including consent-based definitions of rape; repeal of PTA provisions enabling abuse; meaningful reparations and psychosocial support; and security-sector reform.
Internationally, the report urges continued evidence preservation, universal jurisdiction prosecutions, and scrutiny of Sri Lankan personnel deployed in UN peacekeeping missions.
Human rights groups have echoed the urgency. Amnesty International described the report as a clarion call, reaffirming that sexual violence during the conflict was deliberate and systemic.
Sri Lanka is attempting economic recovery and political renewal. But reconciliation is not built on growth figures or electoral mandates alone. It rests on the state’s willingness to confront its own conduct— especially when that conduct implicates power.
Without that reckoning, the war may be over. Justice is not.
And impunity, as this report makes clear, has proved far more durable than peace.
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