A/HRC/45/45/Add.1 29. Although victims pay the highest price for this lack of progress, society as a whole pays a significant price as well. The delays raise questions about the Government’s commitment to undertaking a comprehensive transitional justice programme and undermine trust, which is not plentiful, as demonstrated by continued incidents of inter-ethnic violence. Moreover, the delays have additional spillover consequences. To illustrate, although some of the land occupied by the armed forces has been returned, the lack of clarity and comprehensiveness of the process – in which the armed forces are both a party and the judge – has serious consequences not only for those directly affected but also, more generally, for economic development. The underlying problem uncovers a weak regime of property rights that is also a great disincentive for foreign investors. The fact that the judicial system is so backlogged and slow (a 2017 study pointed to a 17-year delay)9 only compounds the difficulties. 30. Furthermore, delays in the design and implementation of a comprehensive transitional justice policy make its adoption more arduous over time, for the reasons set out below. 31. Delays have caused transitional justice to become entangled in partisan politics, while it ought to be dealing solely with questions of fundamental rights. 32. In a highly polarized context, the absence of a comprehensive plan with foreseeable provisions for the rights to truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence has made an easy target of transitional justice, and of human rights more broadly. In the absence of a clear and transparent plan, public debates on transitional justice generate apprehension and fear, without the information to assuage them. 33. Discussions about transitional justice in Sri Lanka have increasingly suffered from various forms of distortion. For example, they have sometimes focused on the final days of the conflict, when they should be broader. In addition, the debate has been unhelpfully, gradually and purposefully narrowed to a discussion of the nationality of judges in accountability mechanisms. This politicization has also led to an increased “ethnicization” of the transitional justice project, which has been represented as a boon for only one minority group and as a threat for the majority community. 34. In light of the aforementioned risks, the lack of an informed debate proactively supported by the Government is difficult to understand. 10 The costs of delays can be measured in terms of rights violations and of human suffering (often involving victims in all communities that have been neglected for decades) past, present and future, given that failing to address the past promptly risks fuelling new cycles of violence, as history has repeatedly shown. IV. Truth-seeking mechanisms 35. Sri Lanka is no stranger to truth-seeking mechanisms, having had far more commissions of inquiry into human rights violations, especially disappearances, than most countries. Some of those commissions have unearthed significant information, stimulated public debate and, occasionally, made useful recommendations. The view of critics that such commissions have been established to deflect international pressure and calls for judicial investigations, however, is given credence by the commissions’ weak mandates, problematic membership, lack of resources, procedural opacity, poor collaboration from the Government, lack of publicity of some of their reports and the overall lack of implementation of their recommendations. 36. Previous commissions have not contributed to closing the significant confidence gap among communities, restoring the rights of victims or making State institutions more 9 10 6 See www.parliament.lk/uploads/comreports/1510738363068517.pdf. The view that the Government could have exercised greater ownership of the project and engaged in more forward-looking planning and in much more effective communication and debate takes on board the fact that Sri Lanka has faced serious security concerns and also that, after 2015, the Government embarked simultaneously on a constitutional reform process. In any event, it is not clear that the slow and wavering pace on accountability and redress has made the security or the constitutional challenges more manageable – indeed, the Special Rapporteur argues to the contrary.