Expert Roundtable:
Transformation in Sri Lanka
Opportunities for Transitional Justice
Event Description
PILPG hosted a conversation with experts on August 5 from 12 pm to 1 pm EDT regarding the recent economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka and the importance of maintaining accountability, respect for human rights, and reconciliation as Sri Lanka navigates this challenging and uncertain time.
For months Sri Lanka has suffered from rising inflation and drastic food and fuel shortages, causing a humanitarian crisis in the country and driving much of the country to the streets in protest. Many years of political corruption and government mismanagement, in addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, has instigated Sri Lanka’s current economic crisis. Mistrust in the government remains high and Sri Lanka’s previous sitting President Rajapaksa resigned after weeks of anti-government protests. Sri Lanka’s new president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, took office last week but the country continues to face economic collapse and political instability. Difficult economic reforms and political transformation lie ahead for Sri Lanka in order to secure peace and democracy in the country and to put an end to the current political and economic crises.
During this event our panelists provided expert background to Sri Lanka’s civil war and recent crises, explored accountability options within the current context, and discussed the role of transitional justice in Sri Lanka’s pursuit of durable peace and democracy. This event was moderated by PILPG President Dr. Paul R. Williams.
This event is part of the PILPG Thought Leadership Initiative. The Initiative focuses on prominent international law and international affairs topics and organizes monthly expert roundtables to share expertise and reflections from our work on peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and war crimes prosecution.
Speakers
Miriam Young
Miriam Young has worked for two and a half decades on peace and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka. She was a co-founder of the US NGO Forum on Sri Lanka, a non-partisan network of organizations working for peace, human rights, and development in Sri Lanka, whose activities ranged from working with Sri Lankan expatriates of all ethnicities on conflict resolution, hosting Sri Lankan civil society activists in Washington, engaging regularly with officials and policy makers in the US government, the Sri Lankan government, the United Nations, and the World Bank.
Ms. Young is currently Executive Director to the Forum’s successor, the US Counsel on Sri Lanka, and serves as US Director of the International Working Group on Sri Lanka. She has served as a consultant for non-governmental organizations with programs in the country. Ms. Young has also participated in many election monitoring delegations over the course of her career, in Sri Lanka as well as other countries in the region.
Ms. Young has been a passionate advocate for human rights and democracy throughout the Asia region, having served as Executive Director of the Asia Pacific Center for Justice and Peace, a non-profit dedicated to promoting just US policies toward the region through partnerships with local advocates and organizations. She has been instrumental in several international campaigns such as banning the use of landmines, ending child prostitution in Asian tourism, promoting self-determination in East Timor and a return to democracy in Burma/Myanmar. Prior to her policy advocacy career, she worked in the field on programs with Cambodia and Afghan refugees.
Ms. Young holds a B.A. from Wellesley College and a Master of Int’l Affairs from Columbia University.
Jehan Perera
Jehan Perera is a founder member and presently Executive Director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka (NPC) which was established in 1995 and works in all parts of the country with networks of partner NGOs and inter-religious groups. NPC focuses on building public support for a political solution to the ethnic conflict and on supporting inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict mitigation through community cohesion. He is also on the board of the People's Action for Free and Fair Elections and the Centre for Communication Training. He writes a regular weekly political column for the national media that focuses on the peace building and reconciliation processes.
Mario Gomez
Mario Gomez is the Executive Director at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, an independent think-tank in Sri Lanka, and an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies, National University of Singapore. He has worked in academia, human rights, and peace building, and previously taught constitutional law, administrative law, and legal theory at the University of Colombo. He was a post-doctoral Fulbright scholar at the Kennedy School of Government.
Recent and forthcoming publications include ‘Prosecuting Religious Violence in Sri Lanka’, ‘Advancing Economic and Social Rights through National Human Rights Institutions’, ‘The Right to Information and Transformative Development Outcomes’, ‘Hate Speech in Sri Lanka During the Pandemic’, ‘The Courts Respond to Executive Tyranny in Sri Lanka’, ‘The Politics of Dealing with the Past in Deeply Divided Sri Lanka’, ‘Drifting Between Democracy and Despotism in Sri Lanka’, ‘The Death Penalty in Sri Lanka: Hanging by a Thread’, ‘Constitutional Change and Institutional Resilience in Sri Lanka’, ‘Mixing Writs with Rights: The Implications for Public Law in Sri Lanka’, ‘Constitutional Struggle in Sri Lanka’, and ‘Women, Gender, and the Constitution in Sri Lanka’.
Alan Keenan
Alan Keenan is a Senior Consultant on Sri Lanka at the International Crisis Group and a Visiting Fellow in the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security, where his work is part of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Hub on Gender, Justice and Security. His GCRF research investigates the political, ethical and methodological challenges involved in the production of politically actionable knowledge about conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence in Sri Lanka. He has been leading Crisis Group’s research and advocacy on Sri Lanka since 2007. He has a PhD in political theory from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford Univ. Press, 2003), as well as articles on political theory and on Sri Lankan politics.
Before joining Crisis Group in 2006, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and a Visiting Fellow at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, from 2000-2003. Alan also worked as a consultant for the Programme on Human Rights and Conflict at the Law and Society Trust in Colombo. From 2003-2005 he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Peace and Conflict Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he taught courses on human rights, conflict, democratization, and transitional justice.
Alan has a PhD in political theory from the Johns Hopkins University and has taught political, legal, and social theory at the Universities of California at Berkeley and at Santa Cruz and at Harvard University. In addition to Democracy in Question and articles on political theory, his academic work has focused on the activities of local and international NGOs in the context of Sri Lanka’s quarter century civil war. He is working on a manuscript entitled “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The Politics of Human Rights and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka.”
Ambika Satkunanathan
Ambika Satkunanathan is a human rights advocate. For more than twenty years she has worked with communities and community organisations impacted by human rights violations, in particular, assisting them access remedies. From Oct 2015 to March 2020, she was a Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, where she led the first ever national study of prisons. Prior to that for 8 years she was a Legal Advisor to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. She is a member of the Expert Panel of the Trial Watch Project of the Clooney Foundation and a member of the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. She is an affiliate of the Eleos Justice Centre, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. She has a B.A. and LL.B from Monash University and a LL.M from University of Nottingham where she was a Chevening Fellow. She was a Fellow of the Open Society Foundations from 2020-2022.
MODERATOR
Dr. Paul R. Williams
Dr. Paul R. Williams holds the Rebecca I. Grazier Professorship in Law and International Relations at American University where he teaches in the School of International Service and at the Washington College of Law. Dr. Williams is also the co-founder of the Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG), a pro bono law firm providing legal assistance to states and governments involved in peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and the prosecution of war criminals. As a world renowned peace negotiation lawyer, Dr. Williams has assisted over two dozen parties in major international peace negotiations and has advised numerous parties on the drafting and implementation of post-conflict constitutions. Several of Dr. Williams' pro bono government clients throughout the world joined together to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. Williams has served as a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as an Attorney-Adviser for European and Canadian affairs at the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Legal Adviser. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Dr. Williams is a sought-after international law and policy expert. He is frequently interviewed by major print and broadcast media and regularly contributes op-eds to major newspapers. Dr. Williams has authored six books on various topics concerning international law, and has published over three dozen scholarly articles on topics of international law and policy. He has testified before the U.S. Congress on a number of occasions relating to specific peace processes, transitional justice, and self-determination. Dr. Williams is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, and has served as a Counsellor on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. In 2019, Paul was awarded the Cox International Law Center's Humanitarian Award for Advancing Global Justice. More information about Dr. Williams can be found at www.drpaulrwilliams.com.