A senior Sri Lankan official claimed that The Elders, a group of senior luminaries founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, have “become senile” or “deliberately twisted the facts about Sri Lanka” in a statement that lashed out at the organisation this week.

Sugeeswara Senadhira, the Director of International Media at the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo, was responding to an earlier statement that referenced Sri Lanka when the group spoke on US President Donald Trump’s refusal to “adhere to the protocols and processes governing the transition of power”.

US Congressmen Brad Sherman and Jamie Raskin introduced a House Resolution calling for an end to enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka, across Asia and around the world and also calls upon the United States to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

The resolution highlights that "Tamil families of the disappeared have demonstrated tremendous courage in conducting continuing protests, lasting over 1,300 days to demand answers from the Sri Lankan state, despite being met with threats, intimidation, and harrassment by state security forces."

It also noted that Sri Lanka has "promoted high-ranking military officials suspected of forcibly disappearing persons and bearing responsibility for war crimes, incuding Lieutenant General Shavendra Silva, and has failed to hold accountable other current military officials accused of war crimes."

Amidst a Sri Lankan state crackdown of commemoration activities for Maaveerar Naal, Tamil families of the disappeared have asserted families' rights to remember their war dead.

‘‘No one can stop individuals from participating in the remembrance. The mothers will also commemorate in the same way’’ a representative of families protesting in Vavuniya said.

‘By bringing the war to an end, we have created a situation where the people in Northern Province are eating pizzas whereas they earlier used to eat Puttu, Vadai and Soru [Rice],’ Jaffna Headquarters Inspector Prasad Fernando said to the Jaffna Magistrate Court in a hearing last week.

Sri Lankan police stopped and interrogated a divisional council member in Mullaitivu for over three hours in connection with the upcoming anniversary of the Iyankulam massacre carried out by the Sri Lankan army's Deep Penetration Unit (DPU).

Thunukkai divisional council member, S Sujansan said Mallavi police threatened him against commemorating the victims of the targeted claymore attack of November 27, 2007 which claimed the lives of eleven people, including seven students between the ages of 13 and 22. The students had been travelling in an ambulance to a voluntary first aid class.

Sri Lanka's army commander saw off a group of soldiers earlier this week, who are off to join a UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, despite human rights concerns. 

Last year, the UN announced it would ban all "non-essential" Sri Lankan troops in response to the appointment of Shavendra Silva, due to his abysmal human rights record. 

The United Nations failed to “prevent ethnic slaughter in places like Sri Lanka” said former US president Barack Obama in his memoir, ‘A Promised Land’, reflecting on his time at the White House.

“I read the U.N.’s 1945 founding charter and was struck by how its mission matched my mother’s optimism,” wrote Obama, reflecting on his early conversations as a child about the global body. “Needless to say, the U.N. hadn’t always lived up to these lofty intentions.”

“In the middle of the Cold War, the chances of reaching any consensus had been slim, which is why the U.N. had stood idle as Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary or U.S. planes dropped napalm on the Vietnamese countryside. Even after the Cold War, divisions within the Security Council continued to hamstring the U.N.’s ability to tackle problems. Its member states lacked either the means or the collective will to reconstruct failing states like Somalia, or prevent ethnic slaughter in places like Sri Lanka.”

The Sri Lankan state has intensified its crackdown on commemorations of Maaveerar Naal, the Tamil national remembrance day for fallen LTTE fighters, with police obtaining court injunctions against commemorations in several districts and both police and Sri Lankan army setting up roadblocks and checkpoints around LTTE cemeteries.

The Jaffna High Court on Friday rejected petitions against a number of injunctions, with the judge ruling that the court had no jurisdiction to issue such an order. The court however further stated that no one can prevent the petitioners from commemorating individually, but that collective commemoration was a matter related to national security.

The UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), has published an updated report on 30 countries of human rights concerns, noting that the “human rights environment in Sri Lanka worsened”.

Human rights under attack

The report highlights specific concerns over the surveillance and intimidation of activists, human rights defenders, and high-profile human rights lawyers whilst also raising alarm over the pardoning of Sunil Ratnayake. They note that this was “the only member of the armed forces convicted of a wartime atrocity”.