US-based advocacy organisation People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) welcomed Canada's targeted sanctions against the Rajapaksa brothers and other Sri Lankan military officials but urged the international community to go further to ensure justice and accountability for Tamils.
Earlier today, the Canadian government announced targeted sanctions against Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa as well as Sunil Ratnayake and Chandana Prasad Hettiarachchi for “gross and systematic violations of human rights during the armed conflict in Sri Lanka”.
The sanctions will effectively freeze any assets they may hold in Canada, bar them from financial or related services and deem them inadmissible to Canada under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
Whilst welcoming the sanctions, PEARL highlighted in a statement that justice and accountability for the war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan officials "remain unaddressed".
"Tamils in the North-East still deal with enforced disappearances, militarization, land grabs, and other human rights issues disproportionately affecting them, as well as the ongoing trauma from the genocide. The Sri Lankan state’s impunity and treatment of genocidaires as ‘war heroes’ continues unabated," PEARL wrote.
"The pernicious Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist politics responsible for repeatedly voting the Rajapaksas into power on the island shows the ongoing lack of appetite for domestic accountability for the Rajapaksas' crimes against Tamil and Muslim communities. For this reason, it is up to the international community to ensure justice and accountability for Tamils," they added.
PEARL called on Canada and the international community to support victim -centric internationalised justice mechanism, to exercise universal jurisdiction to hold perpetrators accountable and ensure that the Tamil victim-survivor community are involved in any future accountability mechanisms.
Read PEARL's full statement here.