sri lanka's commissions of inquiry - Law & Society Trust

killings and human rights violations, including three Commissions
on disappearances and the Batalanda Commission. The time period
covered by the warrant for all these commissions is the same, from
1988 to 1990. 78
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS:
The Commission’s detailed Report arises out of six thousand seven
hundred and eighty pages of typed proceedings, contained in twenty
eight volumes, and handed over to the President with the report. The
Commission’s sittings spanned one hundred and twenty seven days,
during which eighty two persons appeared before the Commission and
one hundred and twenty six items of productions and documents were
produced and marked as evidence by the witnesses.
The Report is significant in that it provides the most well documented
and substantiated case against individuals at every level of the state
apparatus for human rights violations, including torture, disappearances
and extra judicial killings, during the Reign of Terror. The Commission
looked at the entire chain of command and, through the evidence
presented, found that there was direct and indirect involvement at the
highest levels of government.
The Report suggests that the Commission undertook a rigorous fact
finding exercise, applying evidentiary standards not dissimilar to that
of a court of law. The Commission was able to trace the events with
the help of witnesses who had been detained at the same centres and
had subsequently been released or escaped. 79 The Committee took
care to ensure that the testimony of witnesses was corroborated before
being accepted as credible.
78.
Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Establishment and Maintenance of Places of
Unlawful Detention and Torture Chambers at the Batalanda Housing Scheme, Sessional
Paper No. I – 2000, p. 1.
79.
Three victims who were housed in the Batalanda houses gave evidence before the
Commission while two others, a policeman and an ayurvedic doctor, who were taken to the
houses to see the tortured inmates, also testified.
61