The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka: The Global Failure to Protect Tamil Rights Under International Law

Sri Lanka’s government declared victory in May, 2009, in one of the world's most intractable wars

after a series of battles in which it killed the leader of the Tamil Tigers, who had been fighting to

create a separate homeland for the country's ethnic Tamil minority. The United Nations said the

conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in Sri Lanka since full-scale civil war broke

out in 1983.

A US State Department report offered a grisly catalogue of alleged abuses, including the killing of

captives or combatants seeking surrender, the abduction and in some cases murder of Tamil

civilians, and dismal humanitarian conditions in camps for displaced persons.

Human Rights Watch said the U.S. report should dispel any doubts that serious abuses were

committed during the final months of the 26-year civil war. The report gains added significance

since, during these five months, the Sri Lankan Government denied independent observers,

including the media and human rights organizations, access to the war zone, and conducted a

“war without witnesses.

This second edition traces the ongoing engagement in the Sri Lankan conflict of Professor

Francis A. Boyle, an eminent American expert in international law, from the conflict's last years to

the present pursuit of UN recognition of the Tamil genocide and call for reparations. It is the first

book to develop an authoritative case for genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka

under international law.

Such charges by an expert like Boyle should not be taken lightly: In 1993, Boyle took the

remarkably similar case of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the International Court of

Justice, setting a historical precedent by winning not one, but two Orders from the Court against

the rump Yugoslavia.

Professor Boyle was among the very few to address the international legal implications of the

Sri Lankan Government's grave and systematic violations of Tamil human rights while the

conflict was actually taking place, and to excoriate the UN and those significant states and actors

in the global community whose failure to prevent it, Boyle charges, amounted to complicity in

genocide.

A seminal lecture in the book outlines the legal basis for the Tamils to exercise their

right under international law to proclaim a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and establish a Tamil state.