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No Justice for Sri Lankan Male Survivors

[Charu Lata Hogg is the Director of the All Survivors Project at the UCLA School of Law and an Associate Fellow, Asia Program, Chatham House. This post is based on primary research conducted by Mirak Raheem, Deanne Uyangoda and Marisa De’Silva in Sri Lanka.] Eight years since Sri Lanka’s nearly three-decade conflict came to a brutal end following the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the country is still coming to grips with the legacy of massive human rights violations committed by all sides. Egregious abuses by state security forces and armed groups also took place during other insurgencies in Sri Lanka, specifically during the armed insurrections in the south by the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) first in 1971 and then 1987-1989. However, sexual violence against men and boys, particularly in the context of detention under a previous infamous security legislation, has only recently begun to be recognised as among the numerous abuses that have taken place within the context of the armed conflict. A proposed Counter Terrorism Act (CTA) which is awaiting Parliamentary approval threatens to continue prolonged detention without charge. If approved this counter-terrorism bill could continue to facilitate human rights abuses in detention. A 2015 report resulting from UN investigations concluded that men were as likely to be victims of sexual violence as women within the context of detention (The investigations were mandated by the Human Rights Council (Resolution 25/1) to investigate allegations of violations of international law following the breakdown of the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement to the end of the conflict. See, Report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Investigation on Sri Lanka (OISL)), but the issue remains largely hidden and stigmatized. At the core of this silence is the lack of legal protection for men and boys against sexual violence which informs social attitudes and contributes to an environment in which violations can take place with virtual impunity. In addition to law reform, a fundamental gap in knowledge and expertise on preventing, investigating and responding to sexual violence constitutes a significant barrier. Training of all relevant government, official and professional stakeholders including members of law enforcement and security forces, the judiciary, national human rights institutions, medical and mental health professionals and humanitarian workers could provide a crucial first step. In numerous cases of sexual violence against men and boys documented by the UN and other international organisations, victims were detained under the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) which has been widely used to detain LTTE suspects and under which many fundamental rights and guarantees to protect detainees are suspended. There have been repeated calls for its repeal and the new government which came into power in 2015 has promised to do so. Yet, the PTA remains on the statute books and continues to be applied, permitting the administrative detention for up to 18 months with only limited judicial supervision, irregular access to legal representation, and without the possibility of challenging the legality of detention. The PTA also creates an environment in which forced confessions are effectively encouraged by permitting statements made to police officers at any time while in custody to be admitted in court as evidence, with the burden placed on the accused to prove that the confession was extracted under duress. A complex set of factors prohibit male victims of sexual violence in Sri Lanka from coming forward to report this violation. But even if they did, Sri Lanka does not recognise the possibility of male rape under the law. Rather men are defined only as perpetrators of rape. Article 363 of the Penal Code states “a man is said to commit rape who has sexual intercourse with a woman under any of the following descriptions…” (See Section 363 of the Penal Code (Ordinance No. 2 of 1883 as amended). Similarly, the prohibition of statutory rape applies only to girls under the age of 16 years and not to boys (Section 363(e) of the Penal Code in describing conditions for statutory rape refers to “…with or without her consent when she is under sixteen years of age).) Similarly, the prohibition of statutory rape applies only to girls (under the age of 16 years) and not to boys (Section 363(e) in describing conditions for statutory rape refers to “…with or without her consent when she is under sixteen years of age” [emphasis added]). Other provisions under the Penal Code mischaracterize or define sexual violence in a way that they do not reflect the lived experience of survivors, are inconsistent with the more inclusive, gender-neutral definitions under international law, or are otherwise inadequate for prosecuting sexual violence against males. This legal discrimination against men and boys which is so acutely reflected in Sri Lankan law also permeates other institutions and sectors and contributes to the pervasive lack of medical, counselling and other support services available to male survivors. While services for women are equally inadequate, increased attention on this issue during the post-war phase has triggered a recognition of this issue which remains entirely absent in the case of male survivors. Some medical teaching institutions continue to put forward the understanding that only women can be raped and do not recognise the rape of men. Other representatives of the humanitarian community have admitted to All Survivors Project that sexual violence against men is neither monitored nor responded to during the conflict or outside of it. Added to this is the widespread discrimination against homosexuals which is prescribed in law and the criminalization of consensual same sex acts which may also discourage male survivors from reporting or accessing services for fear that they may be accused of homosexual activity. Specifically, Sections 365 and 365A criminalize certain homosexual acts categorizing them as ‘unnatural offences’. These provisions have been used to persecute members of the LGBTIQ community and serve to reinforce discriminatory gender stereotypes. During our research,

The Downing of the Syrian Fighter Jet and Collective Self-Defence

[Kinga Tibori-Szabó is the author of the monograph Anticipatory Action in Self-Defence, which won the 2012 Francis Lieber Prize. She currently works at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the employing organization.] On 18 June 2017, a US Navy Super Hornet shot down an SU-22 fighter...

Civilian Casualties and the Law-Policy Conundrum

[Charles Kels is a major in the U.S. Air Force. His views do not reflect those of the Air Force or Department of Defense.] While Syrian atrocities and North Korean provocations have garnered headlines of late, it is the threats posed by non-state actors (and their transnational pursuit by powerful militaries) that have most bedeviled scholars and practitioners of international law...

An Alternative Justification for Israel’s Attacks on Hezbollah in Syria

[Ernesto J. Sanchez is an attorney in Miami, Florida who concentrates his practice on appellate and international dispute resolution matters. He is also a senior analyst for Wikistrat, a geostrategic analysis consultancy, as well as the author of The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act Deskbook, published by the American Bar Association.] Asaf Lubin’s excellent post on Just Security questioning why Israel’s repeated strikes against Hezbollah in Syria have not been the subject of the same degree of legal analysis as the recent U.S. attack on a Syrian airfield has received two notable responses. The first is from the eminent U.S. Air Force General Charles J. Dunlap (retired), who utilizes an anticipatory self-defense framework to defend the strikes and explain the consequent lack of jus ad bellum scrutiny the Israeli strikes have received. The second is from Opinio Juris’s very own Kevin Jon Heller, who has criticized General Dunlap’s analysis by calling the strikes “precisely the kind of anticipatory self-defense that international law prohibits.” A purely anticipatory self-defense framework, however, may not provide the best, or at least not the only, approach for examining the strikes’ legality because it entails looking at the strikes in isolation and not from the perspective of the state of war that has existed between Syria and Israel since 1967. It is this state of war that guarantees Israel’s basic right to launch strikes against Hezbollah in Syria at times of Israel’s choosing. The fighting in the 1967 Six-Day War ended after Israel, Jordan, and Egypt agreed to abide by U.N. Security Council Resolution 234, a demand for a cease-fire on the parts of all belligerents, and a Syrian-Israeli cease-fire noted by U.N. Security Council 235. The October 1973 hostilities between Israel and an Arab state coalition including Syria popularly known as the Yom Kippur War was the subject of three U.N. Security Council cease-fire demands – U.N. Security Council Resolutions 338, 339, and 340. Resolution 340, enacted on October 25, 1973, was successful in regard to all the fighting save solely for that between Syria and Israel. Indeed, Israeli forces had driven deep into Syrian territory and continued to engage in skirmishes and artillery exchanges with their Syrian opponents. Only shuttle diplomacy by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was able to produce a disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel based on U.N. Security Council Resolution 338 that mandated the exchange of prisoners of war, Israeli forces’ withdrawal to the Golan Heights territory captured in 1967, and the establishment of a U.N. buffer zone. That agreement took effect on May 31, 1974. So how can a state of war between Syria and Israel have continued to the present day? After all, Mr. Lubin, in pointing out that Israel last engaged in protracted armed violence in Syria in 1974, asserts that “to suggest that an armed conflict [has been] ongoing ever since seems improbable, even under the most liberal interpretation of the way wars end and the termination of the application of international humanitarian law . . .” Tel Aviv University Professor Yoram Dinstein, a former Charles H. Stockton Professor of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College, notes in his book War, Aggression and Self-Defence that a war can end in one of five ways, none of which consist of a cease-fire alone.

• A peace treaty, the ideal way of ending an interstate war, normally entails provisions that resolve the issues (e.g., agreement on the delimitation of borders) that drove belligerents to war in the first place and often includes guidelines for future amicable relations (e.g., the establishment or renewal of diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties).
• Once referred to in Hague Regulations 36 to 41, which are annexed to Hague Convention II of 1899 and Hague Convention IV of 1907, as a mere suspension of hostilities akin to what is now known as a cease-fire, an armistice is today understood to terminate hostilities and divest belligerents of the right to renew military operations without addressing the issues underlying a conflict, consequently leaving room for a subsequent peace treaty.
• A state of war may also terminate through implied mutual consent – an actual termination of hostilities on both sides that is not memorialized. This type of situation occurs when some additional event indicating all belligerents’ intent to cease hostilities, such as the establishment or restoration of diplomatic relations, occurs during a lull in fighting.
• A state of debellatio entails one belligerent party’s complete and utter defeat, whereby (a) the party’s entire territory has been occupied; (b) the party’s armed forces are no longer in the field due to unconditional surrender or the like and no allied forces carry on fighting by proxy; and (c) the party’s government has ceased to exist and no government in exile offers opposition.
• War can also end with a unilateral declaration by a belligerent party if the other belligerent party or parties are willing to cease hostilities or unable to do otherwise.

The cease-fires between Syria and Israel do not comport with any of the above scenarios, especially given how the issues driving the state of war between the two countries – Syria’s refusal to recognize Israel and Israel’s Golan Heights occupation – have not been resolved. Moreover,