A/HRC/45/45/Add.1 determining role in whether progress is made in a case – is largely unaccountable and compounds the difficulties. Moreover, the Office plays a role in litigation as well as in the drafting of legislation and the examination of its constitutionality, which gives it strong influence in the elaboration and application of laws. Over time, an institutional culture seems to have developed that sees the Office as the judicial arm of the State, rather than as the protector of the individual rights of citizens. 51. Many countries with similar criminal justice systems have opted to separate these two functions of the Office of the Attorney General. One plausible strategy would be to create an independent public prosecution service. In a criminal justice system faced with several problems (long-lasting impunity, massive violations, ethnic divisions, security threats, inadequate protection for victims and witnesses and protracted procedures), the current design of the Office is one of the greatest challenges. Without a radical structural transformation of the Office, it is unlikely that the criminal justice system will achieve significant progress.26 52. These structural and legal challenges make sensitive cases extremely vulnerable to political interference in the form of procrastination, which is often enough to ensure that cases remain unsolved. Historically weak divisions of power and, more generally, weak institutions with powers and responsibilities that are not carried out ex officio but only upon specific request of or clearance by a higher authority make the Office of the Attorney General, as it is currently structured, particularly unsuited to the country’s needs. 53. Considering the past record of the criminal justice system, its abiding serious challenges and the absence of determined action on the part of the Government to break the long history of impunity, it is difficult for the Special Rapporteur to understand the Government’s opposition to any form of internationalized judicial mechanism. VI. Reparations 54. In the Office for Reparations Act, it is recognized that “a comprehensive reparations scheme anchored in the rights of all Sri Lankans to an effective remedy will contribute to the promotion of reconciliation for the wellbeing, and security of all Sri Lankans including future generations”. The Office’s objectives are to recommend to the Cabinet of Ministers policies on reparations to grant individual and collective reparations to “aggrieved persons” and to facilitate and implement such policies, including special measures on public education, on memorialization and on children, youth, women, victims of sexual violence and persons with disabilities. The Act sets out the need to ensure the compatibility of the Office with other mechanisms aimed at reconciliation and to monitor and evaluate the progress of delivery of reparations to eligible “aggrieved persons”. 55. The Special Rapporteur considers the establishment of the Office for Reparations to be an important initiative and welcomes the fact that the Ministry of Finance has made budgetary provisions for it.27 He wishes to offer the following reminders, for Sri Lanka is not a stranger to reparations programmes: (a) Like the other elements of a comprehensive transitional justice policy, reparations work best in tandem with the rest. For a measure to be reparative, it must be accompanied by truth, acknowledgment, justice and guarantees of non-recurrence. The previous claim that victims prefer development to reparations has turned out to be false. Victims have an interest in, a need for and a right to reparations; (b) Reparation schemes can fail to satisfy that right if other justice-related measures are absent and/or if there are inequities in the selection of beneficiaries and benefits or in the order in which claims are satisfied, and/or if procedures are not victimfriendly. The Government of Sri Lanka has invested in reparations mainly through compensation initiatives carried out by the Rehabilitation of Persons, Properties and 26 27 10 In this comparative argument, the Special Rapporteur does not criticize the performance of individual attorney generals but underscores, rather, the structural problem. In July 2019, the Office provided compensation (SL Rs 265 million) to victims of the Easter Sunday attacks and their families.