The Marga Institute, the oldest independent think-tank in Sri Lanka headed by its founder and Chairman Emeritus Dr. Godfrey Gunatilleke, released its report of the recent Seminar on “Accountability, Restorative Justice and Reconciliation”. Held at the Marga Auditorium on 27 July, 2011, the Seminar reviewed the report of the UN Secretary General’s Panel of Experts on accountability in Sri Lanka.

The seminar was organized in four sessions with panel discussants Prof. Lakshman Marasinghe, Fr. Noel Dias and Mr. David Blacker. The first session featured a brief presentation of the working paper; the second session dealt with the Panel’s account of the last stages of the conflict and IDPs; the third examined the Panel’s application of the law and the discussion of the approaches taken by the panel and the Government on restorative justice and accountability. The fourth session was devoted to the issues of post-conflict reconciliation.

The presentations made by the main discussants David Blacker and Arjuna Gunawardena and their detailed analysis of specific actions which the Panel had presented as war crimes highlighted the serious shortcomings in the Panel’s report. They strongly argued that the Panel’s version of the government strategy and the account of events during the last stages of the conflict displayed a lack of information and understanding of the full nature of the military operation and the options available to the Sri Lankan army.

The presentation in the first session had stressed that the Panel had failed “to examine the wide ranging controversy of the applicability of the existing humanitarian law and rules of conventional war to these extreme situations and the need to redefine the rules of war; consequently it had made no contribution to the definition and enhancement of the process of accountability and law pertaining to these extreme situations.”

Follow http://www.srilankaembassy.fr/images/stories/in_focus/Darusman-Seminar_Report.pdf for the full report.