It said efforts to prosecute grave human rights abuses remain dangerously slow, with many emblematic cases stalled and victims’ families facing intimidation even under the government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake.
"The Dissanayake government should jump-start its efforts to obtain genuine accountability for the killings and disappearances in the past conflicts," said Lucy McKernan, HRW’s UN Human Rights Council director said Tuesday.
"Expressed commitment to justice must now be matched by credible action."
In a 49-page report released in Geneva ahead of the UN Human Rights Council sessions starting next week, the rights group called on Dissanayake’s government to demonstrate greater political will on accountability.
HRW also urged the administration to cooperate with international efforts to preserve evidence of past crimes.
The report, "Not Genuine with Justice": Sri Lanka’s Lack of Will to Prosecute Past Abuses, examines seven prominent cases in which authorities have made limited progress since the government took office in 2024.
"The Dissanayake administration needs to break from past government practice of delaying and denying justice for grave abuses," said Lucy McKernan, Human Rights Watch’s UN Human Rights Council director.
"The UN Human Rights Council should urge the Sri Lankan government to take credible steps towards accountability for past crimes and end reprisals against victims, their families and human rights defenders," she said.
HRW said investigations into the 2009 assassination of newspaper editor Lasantha Wickrematunge, the 2010 disappearance of journalist and political cartoonist Prageeth Ekneligoda, and the abduction of 11 young men by naval intelligence personnel had resumed or advanced under the new administration.
But the organisation said no indictments had been filed in the Wickrematunge case, while other proceedings remained vulnerable to delay, interference and threats against witnesses. The report also highlighted the investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, which killed 269 people, including 45 foreigners, and wounded more than 500.
Former military intelligence officer Suresh Sallay was arrested in February on allegations of conspiracy and aiding the attacks. Sallay is being held under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act.
A court has since restricted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa and two intelligence officers from travelling abroad in connection with the Easter Sunday probe.
However, HRW said there had been no meaningful movement in the 2006 killing of five Tamil students in Trincomalee or the massacre of 17 mostly Tamil employees of French aid agency Action Contre la Faim. Two decades after the aid workers were killed, no one has been prosecuted.
Chemmani, where more than 580 skeletal remains had been recovered by mid-August, has further exposed the scale of Sri Lanka’s unresolved past. “Excavations alone will not provide justice,” a relative of a disappeared person told HRW. “Will those who are responsible for abuses be held accountable?”
The organisation said successive governments had created more than 10 commissions since the 1990s, but none had led to prosecutions or established the fate of thousands of disappeared people.
HRW urged Colombo to establish an independent public prosecutor’s office, strengthen witness protection, provide forensic and DNA resources, repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act and allow the UN Sri Lanka Accountability Project to conduct investigations. (Colombo/Sept1/2026)