On 25 September 2023, in Frankfurt, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal’s (PPT) international panel of judges presented the judgment for the third and final session of the proceedings dedicated to the Eelam Tamil people of Sri Lanka’s genocide, already examined by the PPT in its Dublin (2010) and Bremen (2014) sessions. The indictment, formulated by the Irish Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka (IFPSL) and the International Human Rights Association (IHRA), highlighted the situation of impunity and denial of the Eelam Tamil people’s right to life in the following terms:
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the continuity of the genocidal process (examined by the PPT in Dublin, considering international law and the massacres that culminated in 2009 in Sri Lanka)
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the denial of the Eelam Tamil diaspora and exile members’ fundamental rights through the qualification of ‘terrorism’, arbitrarily assigned by the USA and not recognised in the UN ad hoc reports.
Based on extremely detailed documentation that highlighted the manner and extent of the fundamental rights violations, the judgment pronounced by the international panel of judges chaired by Ana Esther Ceceña has recognised and qualified USA’s full and direct responsibility as a key actor in creating the conditions for the most acute phases of the genocide: through its boycott of the peace process; in supporting militarily and politically the repressive policies of the Sri Lankan government against Eelam Tamil as explicitly as possible; and, finally, in conditioning the UN Human Rights Council’s decisions in criminalising as terrorism the policies of resistance and democratic transformation of the Eelam Tamil people. The panel of judges further recognised the prosecution’s request to apply, in addition to the qualification of genocide, the definition adopted at Nuremberg of ‘crime against peace’.
Two major components of the PPT panel of judges’ argument should be emphasised:
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the central role of the Eelam Tamil women, main actors of the LTTE liberation project transformation into an original model of substantive democracy. Targeted by the most heinous and extensive violations at all stages of the genocide, the women’s testimonies, reported in the judgment, are in this sense a true ‘judgement within a judgement’;
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the use of legally ambiguous categories such as the widely used one of terrorism, in all its declinations, now established as superior and alternative to human rights and international law.
The documentation of these two aspects forms the backbone of the judgment. With two concluding notes. Firstly, the years elapsed since the 2010 judgement have demonstrated its validity in that the erasure-elimination of the Eelam Tamil people was functional to the strategies of domination of the Indian Ocean by the US and its allies, exercised through the control of the port of Trincomalee, in Eelam Tamil territory. The root of the ‘continuation of the genocide’ is to be found in this specific geopolitical interest. Secondly, the judgment acknowledged the persecution of Eelam Tamil activists in Europe, particularly in Germany, seen as an extension of the ongoing genocide and linked to the European Union’s banning of the LTTE in 2006, pressured by the United States and the United Kingdom. This resulted in the deportation of Tamil refugees and criminal prosecutions for supporting the LTTE.