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Tomorrow Sri Lanka’s new foreign minister Mohamed Ali Sabry faces his baptism of fire. He faces a hard-hitting update on his country’s human rights record and the more recent aggressiveness of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidential dealings with activists demanding the ousting of the Rajapaksas and a political system change.

Those who have read the relevant parts of the report of UN Human Rights High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet would have noticed the underlying concern over Sri Lanka’s regression in its approach to human rights and drawn attention to the abuse of the Wickremesinghe government, its security officials and police arbitrarily employing the widely despised and dreaded Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) for suppressing dissent in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’.

This is one clear issue on which the Sri Lanka delegation led by Minister Ali Sabry and including Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, both lawyers, will find themselves fighting a rear-guard action.

At a media conference a few days back, Minister Ali Sabry said “We are not interested in any confrontations. We are interested in consensus and a cordial relationship with all multilateral agencies and countries,” said Sabry.

“We will engage. We will discuss with the core sponsors, the Human Rights Commissioner and the Commissioners’ office and find the way out.”

If, as he had also said, Sri Lanka is striking out on a new path — one of conciliation rather than one of confrontation — in dealing with the office of the UN High Commissioner and the Human Rights Council, it is logical, as the country needs all the help it can get from the international community given the dire economic straits it finds itself, struggling to find a bailout solution, to begin with.

That is why it has been negotiating assiduously with the IMF and though there has been talk of an agreement at the Staff-Level, there is still a long way to go before it is a done deal.

But to do that, Sri Lanka has to make several concessions which have not been disclosed yet. Still, it is known that the IMF has also been pressing for positive steps to be taken to fight corruption and fraud in political and official circles. Unless very positive steps are announced and taken to end — or at least minimise corruption and fraud and those accountable are dealt with – Sri Lanka is going to find it extremely difficult to win over some of the current Human Rights Council members which are major stakeholders in the IMF.

Minister Ali Sabry recognises this as his words clearly imply. Though the IMF may not have a mandate to deal with human rights there is an existing link, for many western countries that are pushing a human rights agenda are major shareholders in the IMF with a strong voice.

So Mr Ali Sabry is intent on reducing the decibel count when Sri Lanka faces its ‘tormentors’, first when it responds to High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s updated country report and later when the new resolution on Sri Lanka is up for debate and very probably put to the vote.

Ever since the first resolution on Sri Lanka was moved at the UNHRC in 2012, under the Mahinda Rajapaksa presidency, the country has lost every vote and by an increasing margin as a glance at the voting patterns would show.

The worst defeat was last year during the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency when the resolution moved by the Sri Lanka “Core Group” led by the UK in the absence of the US received 22 votes against Sri Lanka’s 11 with 14 abstentions.

Minister Ali Sabry who has been pushed into the deep end even before he could learn about the dangerous Geneva waters made more treacherous by our own litany of broken promises by successive governments and diplomatic amateurism of holding briefings for Colombo-based diplomats and telling them fairy tales when they could damn well see and hear of what goes on at ground level.

So when the authorities talk of violence unleashed by the peaceful, non-violent protesters at GotaGoGama, nobody believes them just as the UNHURC does not believe Sri Lanka when it makes promises to adhere to recommendations of the Council or pretends that major positive changes are on the cards before every new session but they tend to be mere sops to appease critics in the UN.

Ali Sabry’s new policy thrust of conciliation, not confrontation dictated by the new president no doubt, does make sense and is logical.

But what is certainly not logic is this: Why on earth did this government (of sorts anyway) unleash violence on peacefully sleeping protesters, injuring some of them and others including lawyers and journalists both doing their professional jobs?

To make matters worse, the authorities sanctioned the use of the PTA which was intended to eliminate terrorism. If some of those arrested under the PTA were said to have engaged in terrorism, whoever decided to resort to the PTA either has a highly elastic imagination or has some linguistic shortcomings that need rectification before more passers-by end up behind bars.

So here we have a situation where we have a government conscious of the need to appease the international community to win its support to solve a huge economic problem but does not care a damn for the concerns of the same countries that have been calling over the years for Sri Lanka to adhere to its obligations to the international laws and conventions it is a signatory to and have a major say in IMF final decision-making.

Now Michelle Bachelet’s report adds the new charge of “economic crimes” to others such as corruption and fraud that various governments have promised to pursue and end.

This has turned out increasingly into a huge joke. One cannot blame the citizenry for this. Successive governments have failed to catch the crooks and make them pay for their crimes. How could they become crime busters when the criminals are among them?

Remember shortly after the Pandora Papers exposed the assets of Nirupama Rajapaksa and her husband Thiru Nadesan in Australia and London and their other off-shore accounts, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa called on our crime busters for a report in one month. Nobody ever heard of it thereafter.

Now we have a new president. Will he do anything about corruption — not just chasing officials in state institutions but right there in the political establishment, the very centre of corruption? Just a token filing of action against one or two well-known crooks might be a good start. But it should not just be a gesture hoping it will convince those at home and abroad.

If later in this current session, the UNHRC calls for a vote on a resolution and it results in a worse defeat than in 2021, as Ali Sabry seems to anticipate, it will only prove that the world has no trust in Sri Lanka.

After the British Conservative Party the other day picked a new leader and Prime Minister, Liz Truss, some wag was heard saying, “Liz Truss in Britain and distrust in Sri Lanka”.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London)