International campaigners accuses Lankan authorities of continuing rights abuses and torture

International campaigners are accusing Sri Lankan authorities of allowing continuing human rights abuses, including torture and illegal detention, exactly one year after Maithripala Sirisena took power on a reforming ticket in a surprise election win.

The South China morning post in a report said campaigners claim they have documented 27 individual cases of serious human rights abuses occurring in the last 12 months.

Freedom from Torture, a UK-based organisation offering medical aid to survivors of torture, said it had been involved with eight cases. The victim in each was from Sri Lanka’s largely  Tamil minority and the alleged perpetrators were members of the country’s intelligence services or military, which are dominated by the island nation’s largely Buddhist Sinhala majority.

Sonya Sceats, director of policy and advocacy for Freedom from Torture, said Sirisena’s repeated recognition that reconciliation in his nation required accountability for serious human rights abuses was a welcome change.

“But having set a new tone, the president must match his rhetoric with a clear blueprint for rooting out torture from Sri Lanka’s security sector and putting perpetrators on trial, no matter how powerful they may be,” she said.

The NGO says it has medical evidence of torture by the Sri Lankan military and intelligence services since Sirisena came to power which, it said, suggested that “an abusive ‘deep state’ is still terrorising communities and impeding Sri Lanka’s post-war revival”. Military authorities and the police have always denied any wrongdoings and human rights abuses.

A second group has also revealed new evidence suggesting ongoing torture and sexual violence by the Sri Lankan security forces and police, including alleged abductions by unidentified men driving white vans as recently as last month. These “disappearances” became notorious under the repressive rule of Rajapaksa.

“Sadly, it’s very much business as usual,” said Yasmin Sooka, of the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP).

The ITJP’s report, based on the testimony of 20 survivors of torture who are now outside Sri Lanka, also names the main military camp in Vavuniya as a site of torture. One case was investigated by both groups.

Almost all the survivors interviewed by the ITJP were members of the LTTE, though almost all were forcibly conscripted as foot soldiers. Several were under 18 at the time of their recruitment into the organisation and, having spent only weeks within it, did not declare themselves to authorities as former combatants at the war’s end. Several were involved in political activities such as election campaigning as volunteers or campaigning for the disappeared before their abduction. Five of them are women.

Several described torture chambers equipped with cables, rods and batons for beating victims, water barrels and a pulley system for hoisting them upside down. There were repeated and detailed accounts of severe sexual abuse of both male and female detainees. Many were accused by their interrogators of wanting to restart the LTTE – destroyed as an organisation by the end of the war.

The ITJP said medical reports by court-recognised experts in scarring corroborate accounts of injuries, while the cross-referencing of details common to witness statements supported descriptions of individual locations of alleged torture.

“Almost all the statements are taken by lawyers with deep expertise and experience in assessing a survivor’s credibility and if anything was doubtful it would be excluded,” said Frances Harrison, spokesperson for the organisation.