{"id":80277,"date":"2022-11-13T00:27:06","date_gmt":"2022-11-13T04:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=80277"},"modified":"2022-11-13T22:29:01","modified_gmt":"2022-11-14T02:29:01","slug":"80277","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=80277","title":{"rendered":"While Evading Accountability Issues, Sri Lanka Created “Strange Institutions”like the LLRC in a Strategic Move to Provide “Fig Leaf “Excuses for Countries not wanting to Take a Strong Position on Accountability for Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nBy
\nAmanda Taub<\/strong><\/p>\n

A decade ago, Kate Cronin-Furman, then a Ph.D. student in political science at Columbia University, noticed something odd.
\nThe government of Sri Lanka, which the United Nations and international observers had accused of killing tens of thousands of civilians during the final phases of that country\u2019s devastating civil war, had started creating what Cronin-Furman called \u201cstrange institutions\u201d that were supposedly tasked with accountability for atrocities during the war.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission. There was a so-called Army Court of inquiry. There were a couple of other commissions set up,\u201d said Cronin-Furman, who is now a political science professor at University College London.<\/p>\n

These proliferating new commissions and courts seemed to accept, for the first time, the possibility that atrocities had taken place, even though the Sri Lankan government was still furiously denying that. But the new institutions seemed to bring few if any results, and accordingly did nothing to stem the torrent of international criticism from survivors\u2019 groups and human rights organizations, or from the countries that had backed calls for an international inquiry.<\/p>\n

So why create them?<\/p>\n

Answering that question led Cronin-Furman to a much bigger question: whether, and how, international pressure can convince states to change their behavior, with a specific focus on something they tended to be very, very reluctant to do: provide accountability for mass atrocities. Her answer is the subject of her new book, \u201cHypocrisy and Human Rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

To my great surprise, I found it actually gave me some hope about the way power works and can be worked with. Here\u2019s my conversation with Cronin-Furman, edited for length and clarity, about the issue.<\/p>\n


\nAmanda Taub: When you went looking for an explanation for these strange institutions, as you called them, what did you discover?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\nKate Cronin-Furman:<\/strong> The main question that I ended up answering is \u201cHow do post-atrocity governments respond to international pressure for accountability when they really, really don\u2019t want to do it?\u201d<\/p>\n

I mostly focused on the kind of bizarre institutional forms and strategic interactions that emerge when these governments face international pressure from human rights advocates, foreign governments, or the U.N. to do something that is domestically just totally untenable politically: to provide justice and accountability for mass atrocities.<\/p>\n

These strange institutions are not about convincing anyone who\u2019s demanding justice. Victims are not going to be persuaded by this. Your Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International advocates are not going to be persuaded by this. Foreign policy bureaucracies in global north states that do this kind of work are not going to be persuaded by this.<\/p>\n

Rather, these institutions are more about providing a fig leaf for those other states that are asked to take a position on accountability. States on the U.N. Human Rights Council, for instance, that would have to be persuaded to vote for a resolution. And basically, it\u2019s about sparing them the embarrassment and the reputational loss of standing up for a human rights abuser.<\/p>\n

The post-atrocity government itself is saying, \u201cNo, no, no, look, we set up this commission! They\u2019re working on reconciliation! Everything\u2019s great. Leave us alone.\u201d And what that does is to offer to these other states the opportunity to say, \u201cYeah, let\u2019s give them time. They\u2019ve got this institution, and it\u2019s got \u2018reconciliation\u2019 right in the name! We don\u2019t need to be hard-asses about this. We don\u2019t need to infringe on their sovereignty to set up an international inquiry. Give them time.\u201d<\/p>\n

And one thing that maybe gets lost sometimes in other conversations about this stuff is that time is really valuable for human-rights-abusing states. I mean, to put it quite starkly, time can give you the opportunity to bulldoze mass graves, to disappear witnesses. For perpetrators to bolster their domestic power centers to protect themselves. Time can give you the ability to get past a domestic election. You know, if a Human Rights Council resolution coming out might imperil your vote share in an upcoming election, just delaying it for three to six months, that\u2019s valuable.<\/p>\n


\nCan you give an example of how this has played out in practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sri Lanka, while continuing to insist that there had been basically no civilian casualties and definitely no atrocities in the final phases of the war, started to create this series of institutions \u2014 all of which had mandates that were sort of adjacent to the question of accountability for human rights violations, but none of which actually took that issue head on.<\/p>\n

And at first glance, this was really puzzling! Because none of these were compelling to anyone who was actually informed on the human rights issues or engaged on them.<\/p>\n

But where the reaction was different was in those other countries on the Human Rights Council whose votes would have been needed to impanel a strong international inquiry.<\/p>\n

In the record of those council meetings, some of which I was actually present for in Geneva, we see these other countries picking up on the language that Sri Lanka used to defend its institutions, picking up on rhetoric about protesting \u201cWestern human rights pressure\u201d and, you know, \u201cinfringement on Sri Lanka\u2019s sovereignty.\u201d
\nAnd in the end, it was actually five years before there was an international inquiry empaneled in 2014, and it was much weaker than what anyone wanted in the beginning. And I think that is owed to the fact that Sri Lanka very strategically set up these institutions, exactly at moments of kind of coalescing international pressure and, you know, shopped them quite hard to audiences that might find it persuasive.<\/p>\n

Obviously this was a loss for the groups that were calling for an immediate, strong international inquiry. But there is a bigger-picture takeaway here that actually struck me as quite optimistic: This suggests that international responses like condemnation and investigation have real weight, because otherwise why go to such lengths to avoid or delay them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

If I have a personal motto, it\u2019s that, you know, international institutions and human rights pressure are not doing the thing we want them to be doing, but that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re doing nothing.
\nWe tend to get into this very all-or-nothing thinking, but it\u2019s really worth looking at what their impacts actually are, and thinking about how we can maximize them and how we can actually use the levers that are there.<\/p>\n


\nIt seems as if there could be a norm-strengthening effect as well, because when perpetrators do this quasi-compliance, they are in effect publicly stating that these human rights rules should be followed, even if they are denying that they violated them. Which is reassuring to me, in some ways, because it shows a path toward incremental improvements as these norms strengthen over time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That is the hope, right? The fact that these human rights tools exist doesn\u2019t, on its own, do anything. But each time someone picks them up and uses them, at great personal sacrifice and often risk, they make it that much easier and smoother the next time.<\/p>\n

I think a question a lot of people will have after hearing about this book is what it might mean for accountability for Russian atrocities in Ukraine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a much more optimistic read on that situation than what I\u2019m talking about in this book, which are these really hard cases for human rights where you have a repressive, intransigent government and an abused, marginalized population.<\/p>\n

But the fact that Russia has invaded another country\u2019s territory, and that the people who are suffering under those attacks are the citizens of another state, has made it much less complex for other states to stand up for Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Usually when we\u2019re talking about serious violations of human rights, the sovereignty concern is like, \u201cOh, we shouldn\u2019t interfere in this repressive state\u2019s sovereignty here.\u201d But in this case, sovereignty militates in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n

And because Ukraine is a state, they\u2019ve got their own justice system. They\u2019ve got their own prosecutors, some really good ones. I think the ability of Ukraine to prosecute at least the lower and midlevel folks themselves here is an unalloyed good.<\/p>\n

Now, I suspect the question people actually want to know the answer to is what the chances are that Putin, or very high up Russian military commanders, will face justice. And that\u2019s one where there\u2019s probably not a particularly optimistic response.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not going to land before the International Criminal Court unless a very unexpected series of events occurs. It is probably not out of the question that a different international tribunal could be set up with a mandate to try some of those people. But whether they would actually be able to get custody of them would be quite tricky.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n

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By Amanda Taub A decade ago, Kate Cronin-Furman, then a Ph.D. student in political science at Columbia University, noticed something odd. The government of Sri Lanka, which the United Nations and international observers had accused of killing tens of thousands of civilians during the final phases of that country\u2019s devastating civil war, had started creating …<\/p>\n

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