Chemma'ni interim report follows Mannaar script towards OMP dead end

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 28 October 2026, 03:06 GMT]
The Sri Lankan state’s interim report on the Chemma'ni (Cemmaṇi / செம்மணி / Chemmani) mass grave counts at least 574 people at one site in Jaffna. It then suggests they may be old cemetery burials or epidemic victims, with no laboratory testing. It never mentions the 15 skeletons dug up in Chemma'ni in 1999. Samples from them went abroad and never came back, and the SL Justice Minister now says the government no longer holds the 1999 records. Colombo used the same method to bury the Mannaar findings in 2014 and 2019. Eezham Tamils have to keep up the challenge in the Jaffna court and put every refusal on record. Geneva has kept the file in Colombo’s hands for too long. What Tamils need is an independent mechanism with its own forensic teams, and international courts to take the case from there.

The timing matters.

The UN High Commissioner’s report to the 63rd session of the Human Rights Council recommends only the Minnesota Protocol (2016) for Chemma'ni and asks the SL government to “seek” international support. That leaves the state in charge of its own crime scene.

The Bournemouth Protocol (2020) was written for mass graves and is cited by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances. The Council report leaves it out.

What the record already holds

The now defunct North East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESoHR) recorded the background in Lest We Forget, its 2007 compilation of massacres of Eezham Tamils, built on affidavits.

The affidavits held at its secretariat were reportedly destroyed in the 2009 war.

After the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) seized the Jaffna peninsula in the Riviresa I, II and III military operations (1995-1996), people kept vanishing.

NESoHR counted 700 disappeared in the six months from mid-1996, with 600 complaints lodged at the Human Rights Commission.

Amnesty International put it at about 540. The families formed an association and protested.

Following the mounting criticism from human rights groups, SL President Chandrika Kumaratunga appointed a commission of military officers. It produced nothing.

Occupying SLA soldiers stopped Krishanthy Kumaraswamy at the Chemma'ni checkpoint on 7 September 1996. Her mother, brother, and a neighbour went there to ask for her, and they, too, disappeared. Forty-five days later, under pressure from relatives, soldiers showed where the four were buried. They were buried under a bridge on the Naayanmarkkaddu road, about 100 metres from the checkpoint. At his trial, Lance Corporal Somaratne Rajapakse said he could show graves near Chemma'ni holding 300 to 400 bodies, buried on orders from his superiors.

TamilNet has covered this story since the 1998 trial and has followed it long after the case went cold.

Recently, the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) leaned on that work for its July 2026 report on Chemma'ni. Fifty-eight of its endnotes point to TamilNet. For some events, TamilNet is the only source it gives.

ITJP also adds what TamilNet could only point to.

It quotes the statements the convicted soldiers gave in July and August 1998. The soldiers named the chain.

A new commander of the 512 Brigade, Brigadier Gamini Jayasundara, set an “intelligence” drive in July 1996. Bodies came from the Ariyaalai intelligence unit run by Major Amal Karunasekara, and from Koappaay. The bodies were handed to Captain Lalith Hewa and brought by tractor, up to 50 at a time, for burial at night.

A lieutenant kept a book with the names and identity numbers of everyone taken at the checkpoint.

ITJP traces seven of the officers named in the statements or in court. None was prosecuted. All were promoted (ITJP holds these statements and has not made them public, probably for security reasons).

The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances has since asked the state to stop promoting alleged perpetrators.

When the ground was opened in 1999, the victims’ ages were estimated at 16 to 35.

NESoHR records that before the second round of exhumation, people were kept away from the area and military vehicles were seen moving there at night.

TamilNet reported at the time that at least ten of the 15 skeletons examined had head or chest injuries.

The case was then moved to Colombo, the DNA tests were never paid for, and the file sat with the Attorney General. ITJP found that in March 2010 the CID was still telling the court it awaited the Attorney General’s advice on a report filed in October 2001.

The samples sent abroad for analysis were never returned. Nobody who gave the orders was punished.



* * *

The 1999 evidence has gone missing

The 1999 exhumation produced 15 full skeletons. Samples from them were sent abroad for bone analysis and never came back. Some victims were identified from scraps of clothing, yet no family has been given a body.

In July 2025, a group of UN independent experts wrote to the government about the 1999 files. As far as they could tell, the Magistrate had never received the investigation's reports. They wanted to know whether the files had been lost or were being held back.

In June 2026, the SL Justice Minister went further. He said the government no longer holds the forensic findings from those remains, or the records of the wider investigation. “We don’t have the information for 1998,” he said.

That is the background to the new report. It treats the nearby Sithththupaaththi ground as if nothing had ever been found there.

The part of the record that pointed to a crime was lost in state hands. What remains is a new exhumation, written up by archaeologists who talk of old cemeteries and epidemics.

Krishanthy’s relatives and other families have waited thirty years, and now they’re being asked to start over.

And what became of the 15 skeletons from 1999?

Nobody has said. They were exhumed in front of foreign observers, so someone must have taken charge of them. The foreign observers watched, but they had no standing in the court, and the state kept every bone and every file.

The court should find out who took charge of them and where the bones went after that.

The samples are a separate puzzle.

TamilNet reported in November 2002 that the CID had sent DNA samples to a laboratory in Hyderabad, India.

In February 2005, it also reported that a London medical research institute had sent forensic reports on six skeletons.

Those reports went to the Attorney General, and no one has heard from them since. The court can ask both labs what they still hold. If the samples are still sitting there, it may be best to leave them for now. A court order can keep them there until an independent international team can examine them.

Whatever comes up should be included in the same investigation as the new exhumation. It is all one crime scene at Chemma'ni (Chandrika Kumaratunga’s Killing Field).

The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances also worried about this. In its 2025 review of Sri Lanka’s report, it named Chemmani and said authorities lacked the forensic capacity to keep remains safe and track who handled them. It wants to keep all human remains and forensic data “for future accountability processes”. Nothing in that wording limits it to bones found last year. The 1999 skeletons and samples also fall under it.



* * *

Five sets of contradictions observed by TamilNet in 2026

The new report is about 190 pages. Two archaeologists, Raj Somadeva and Anusha Wanninayake, wrote it. Read closely, it falls apart in five places.



Depth. The summary says the depth was “generally” 1.30 to 1.60 metres, which suggests orderly graves. Its own section 12 gives a shallowest burial of 0.24 m. Every skeleton entry we have seen in the annexure lies between 24 and 68 centimetres. Shallow pits cutting into each other look hurried rather than like a cemetery.



Clothing. Section 14 says none of the skeletons had any clothing left and attributes that to the soil. A few pages later, the same report lists cloth, socks, shoes and a plastic bag found with one skeleton. The annexure includes a photo of another person still dressed. So fabric did last in this soil, at least on some bodies. Why is it gone from nearly all the rest? The soldiers gave their own answer in 1998. In the statements ITJP quotes, they say the bodies were stripped, and the clothes were burnt in a separate pit.



Injuries. Go through the skeleton entries in the annexure, and the same paragraph appears repeatedly, word for word. It says there is “no clear evidence” of injury around the time of death. In the same paragraph, it admits the bones were never cleaned or X-rayed, and no laboratory has seen them. So how would anyone know? The cracked skulls are attributed to the weight of the soil. These skulls lay less than 65 centimetres down.



Diversion. The report presents an epidemic with no evidence. It links two seated bodies to Hindu (Saivite) Samādhi burial. It contrasts the hand positions with an ancient Greek mass grave. It puts the one readable burial coin from 1870 up front. It never mentions the 1998 confession, the 1999 exhumations or the 1996 disappearances.



Not fit for a court. The main trench is placed “[insert number] meters” from the cremation platform. Nobody filled in the number. The site coordinates use minutes and seconds above 59, which cannot exist. A figure meant to show the soil layers carries the site map’s caption. The skeleton details cover only “a sample” from the first 150 of 574 bodies. There is no sex, height, dental or DNA data. The interim report shows no record of who has held the remains since exhumation.



The report never says whether any body was blindfolded or had its hands tied. It doesn’t say whether a bullet was found either. That contradicts the Chemma'ni record from 1998 to 2005. In 1999, Amnesty’s observers at the exhumation reported one victim blindfolded and another with hands tied. The same marks appear at Vangkaalai in Mannaar. NESoHR records that in February 1991, SLA soldiers stopped a school principal, a teacher, and others at a junction there. Witnesses saw their hands tied with rope and their eyes blindfolded. Their cut-up bodies were later seen in a well near the military camp.

Eezham Tamils can admit one thing without losing ground. By Tamil custom, infants and small children are buried rather than cremated. So some of the small graves here, and some of the coffin burials with garlands, may well be ordinary family graves. The lawyers can ask to have those examined. That still leaves most of the dead in shallow pits without clothes, and the state will have to account for them.



* * *

Mannaar showed the method

The Vangkaalai case shows how old this pattern is. When the villagers returned in 1993, the well had been filled in, and five skeletons lay in front of it. The SL Police handed them over to Mannaar Hospital, which sent them to Colombo. NESoHR wrote that no inquiry followed. Relatives had earlier gone to the Tha’l’laadi military camp to look for the missing men. In 2019, Mannaar families named the same Tha’l’laadi base a site to be scanned for graves.

In December 2013, workers laying a water pipeline near Thirukkeatheesvaram temple struck human bones. By March 2014, they had recovered more than 80 skeletons. TamilNet reported children among them, signs of torture, skulls with gunshot wounds and people who appeared to have been shot standing up. The army had controlled the area since 1990.

Then the Director General of the Archaeology Department called it a graveyard with bodies “buried systematically”, and the excavation was cancelled. A police spokesman suggested a malaria epidemic from 1936 to 1938. The Chemma'ni report’s epidemic idea is the same move, twelve years later.

The 87 sets of Thirukkeatheesvaram remains have never reached a credible lab abroad. The SL Police first said they would send them to China. Later, the CID said Latin American institutes did not respond to its emails. When Magistrate Alex Raja moved to send them abroad, the CID complained about him to the Judicial Service Commission. In 2016, they reportedly found the remains stored in Anuradhapura.

In 2018, a second grave turned up in Mannaar town, at the old Sathosa building that the military had used. It held more than 335 skeletons, 29 of them children. Two victims had their legs locked in one iron shackle. The media were briefly banned from filming, and magistrates were transferred. Then, just before the March 2019 Geneva session, Colombo released a US carbon-dating result putting six samples at 377 to 615 years old.

TamilNet reported that Colombo avoided focusing on the Thirukkeatheesvaram grave while sending the Sathosa samples to a US lab. Mannaar legal activists said the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) itself was ‘keen’ to establish that the grave had nothing to do with the war.

One detail stands out.

In March 2019, Raj Somadeva rejected that carbon dating, as Asia Times reported and TamilNet relayed. He said the artefacts “we unearthed” did not match it. Today he is the lead author at Chemma'ni. His own team listed plastic buttons, plastic studs and a plastic bag in the burial trench. Yet the summary leans towards an old cemetery.



* * *

Why families can’t turn to the UN treaty body

Families of the disappeared don’t trust the domestic OMP mechanism, and they have said so again and again. The Sri Lankan state set it up in 2016. Yet each new Council resolution points them back to it. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances reviewed the office in September 2025 and left with its own doubts. It also heard why so many families stay away. They fear that once they register, the search for their loved ones will stop and the case will be closed. The Committee noted that people don’t trust it and that its members may not be independent. By then, the office had found 23 people. It had 16,966 cases on its books.

The Sri Lankan state joined the UN Convention on Enforced Disappearance in 2016, but Article 35 has a catch. The Committee that oversees the treaty can only hear cases involving disappearances that began after the treaty took effect for the SL state. Everything before 2016 falls outside, including the whole of the 1990s. Colombo has also never accepted Article 31, so families cannot bring a case to the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED).

In practice, a mother whose son was taken at the Chemma'ni checkpoint in 1996 has nowhere to go at the UN. The same is true for families from Vangkaalai and Thirukkeatheesvaram.

The only option left is the OMP, the office that has traced 23 people. Geneva knows this, yet its resolutions still send families there.

The records are disappearing too.

ITJP reports that in 2003 the army told the Human Rights Commission it had destroyed its arrest records from before 1997. In June 2026, according to ITJP, the SL Justice Minister said the government no longer holds the findings and records of the 1998 and 1999 investigation.



* * *

The evidence project that cannot dig

The evidence project that cannot dig

The Council’s answer to the Tamil call for an IIIM was the OHCHR Sri Lanka Accountability Project, set up under resolution 46/1 in 2021. Its own papers show how little it can do at the sites where the bodies are.

It is not independent.

OHCHR’s own question-and-answer sheet says the work is done “within OHCHR” from Geneva. It says plainly that the project is not like the Syria and Myanmar mechanisms, which are fully independent and much larger. It is not a court either. It cannot bring a single case.

And it has never been mandated to assess genocide.

Resolution 46/1 speaks only of gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law. Myanmar got a fact-finding mission able to look at genocide. No such mission was ever sent to the island.

It has no way into the island. Colombo rejected the mandate from the start.

The High Commissioner’s report to the 63rd session says the government “has declined to engage” with the project.

In its reply to that report, Colombo objects to the project’s “externally established nature”.

So the work is done from outside. Much of the new material came from statements others had taken, from other governments and court files. The project has even asked other states to help it reach witnesses by issuing visas and reviewing asylum claims.

The numbers sound big. By the High Commissioner’s count, the archive holds more than 123,000 items, with material from over 500 witnesses and sources.

But nobody from the project can open a grave, take custody of bones or stop bulldozers.

Its life is short. The mandate was renewed in 2022, then for one year in 2024, then for two years in 2025.

Its April 2026 plan already talks about a “post-OSLap” roadmap.

So far, its main outlet has been responding to requests from universal jurisdiction cases abroad, the sidetrack TamilNet warned about.

ITJP’s own legal chapter leans the same way, towards prosecutions in other countries.

On Chemma'ni, that same plan gives it a small part.

It will offer “technical input” to national partners and draw up minimum benchmarks for an investigation. Colombo will lead the investigation, with Geneva providing advice.



* * *

What TamilNet told the Peoples’ Tribunal

In its testimony to Session III of the Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka in Bremen in May 2022, TamilNet traced how the Council track was bent from the start. In 2008, the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP), set up by the Rajapaksa t,government, walked away from the Sri Lankan state’s own domestic Commission of Inquiry.

NESoHR noted at the time that it left “in frustration”, calling the episode proof of the island’s culture of impunity.

In May 2009 the Council’s special session adopted the Sri Lankan state’s own resolution.

The alternative on the table, a Swiss draft, asked the Sri Lankan state to investigate itself.

Professor Francis Boyle compared it to inviting the Nazi government “to investigate and prosecute itself”.

After that, Myanmar got an independent fact-finding mission under Agenda Item 4, with room to examine genocide, and later its own investigative mechanism.

On the Sri Lankan state, the Council set up only an office inquiry inside the OHCHR under Item 2, with no genocide mandate.

In 2014, the resolution was ‘broadened’ to cover human rights island-wide.

When that inquiry reported in 2015, the High Commissioner said genocide was “not something that we perceive at this stage”.

The 2015 consensus resolution called for a hybrid court, which would hand the crimes back to the state that committed them.

Resolution 46/1 in 2021 set up the evidence project. It was never the IIIM Eezham Tamils asked for.

The TamilNet testimony to the PPT Bremen session made one more point that now hits home at Chemma'ni.

The Council used the Sri Lankan state’s own LLRC timeline, so it left out crimes from the Kumaratunga years.

TamilNet also said plainly that universal jurisdiction cases will not deliver genocide justice, even if they keep the issue alive.



* * *

What Eezham Tamils should demand



TamilNet is not the only voice making these demands.

In September 2025, Tamil diaspora groups in 11 countries sent a Joint Call to the 60th session of the Human Rights Council.

Its main demands came from the homeland.

The annexes include letters from political parties, MPs and 56 homeland dignitaries. P. Ariyanethiran, who stood as the Tamil common candidate in 2024, wrote as well.

The main Tamil political party, ITAK, sent its own letter, and the families of the disappeared added a petition.

They don’t all say the same thing. ITAK still wants an international role inside the OMP while the families want nothing to do with it.

But the main demands line up. They want an independent body to gather the evidence, and a case at the ICJ. They want an international tribunal, not a hybrid one. And they want Chemma'ni handled to the Bournemouth standard.



The first and biggest demand is a proper IIIM-type mechanism. OSLap can’t be that. It operates within OHCHR offices under a Council mandate, so it isn't independent. An IIIM would have its own leadership and on-the-ground staff. Its terms of reference should let it look for genocidal intent and acts that may amount to genocide. It needs its own forensic and mass-grave teams. It should keep remains and family DNA with it, out of the Sri Lankan state’s reach.

How far back it can look matters a great deal.

Intent shows up as a pattern over decades, and a body count from one site won’t reveal it. So its reach should go back to 1948 or to the earliest date the Genocide Convention allows.

NESoHR’s list of massacres alone begins in 1956. Chemma'ni, Vangkaalai, Thirukkeatheesvaram and Sathosa all belong in its files. So do the soldiers’ statements ITJP now holds.

The UN Human Rights Council should move the file to Item 4 and send a field presence with a real mandate. If it won’t, the General Assembly can act. That is how the Syria mechanism was created.



How do Eezham Tamils get there?

The Core Group, now led by Britain, writes the Council’s resolutions on the island. So far it has kept each one inside what Colombo can live with. Pressure on it works best in each member’s own capital. Tamils living there vote, and their MPs answer to them. A question in a national parliament about why that government keeps backing the OMP gets read in its foreign ministry.

The Core Group is not the only door, though.

Another group of countries could table its own draft on the island in the Human Rights Council and move it from Item 2 to Item 4.

There is a precedent.

The Council established the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar through resolution 39/2 in September 2018, based on a draft tabled by the European Union and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

The General Assembly is another route. It created the Syria mechanism, the IIIM, in 2016, on a draft by Liechtenstein and Qatar.

A small state with no stake in the island can take the same step, and a few such states together carry more weight.

And The Gambia took Myanmar to the ICJ with backing from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

Tamils need sponsors like that, and they don’t have to come from the West.

Tamil Nadu counts here as well. Its elected members can press New Delhi, which has abstained on most recent Geneva votes on the island.

The UN’s independent experts are another route. In July 2025, a group of them wrote to the government about the missing 1999 reports. Families and their lawyers can send these experts new facts at any time. Their letters to governments are published, keeping them on the record.



The International Court of Justice works differently.

Only states can bring cases there, and only against other states.

Eezham Tamils need a government that is a party to the Genocide Convention and ready to sue the Sri Lankan state, the way The Gambia sued Myanmar.

A ruling there would be about the state’s own responsibility for genocide.



As for the individuals who gave the orders and the soldiers/paramilitary personnel who carried them out, the ICC can't help with anything before 1 July 2002 because the Rome Statute doesn’t reach that far back.

That rules out a large part of the record: Welikade prison in 1983, the Eastern University camp and Sathurukkondan in 1990, Vangkaalai in 1991, Chemma'ni in 1996 and Bindunuwewa in 2000. Those cases require an international criminal tribunal. And not all the men involved are gone.

ITJP traced seven officers from Chemma'ni. None was ever charged, and every one of them was promoted.

For crimes after 2002, the ICC is the place to go. The Sri Lankan state never joined it, so the Security Council would have to refer the case. That is also the usual way to set up an international criminal tribunal, so both demands go through the same door. And if a tribunal is created to cover the whole period, from the earliest crimes to the end of the war, the ICC won’t be needed at all.

Trials in other countries under Universal Jurisdiction can go on in the meantime. They keep the issue alive, but they won’t bring justice for genocide.



* * *

What to do now, in homeland and diaspora



Going to a Sri Lankan court can look like accepting the domestic process. It does not have to.

The victims’ lawyers may already have objections before the Jaffna Magistrate.

If so, they can include these points in further written submissions.

If not, now is the time to file.

The 1999 evidence should come first. The SL state should be required to say in writing where the 15 skeletons are and which lab received the samples. It also owes the court an answer on what happened to the 1999 reports.

Then comes the request for the full report, with its maps and any medical report.

Next, the authors should explain each contradiction in writing. The paragraph on injuries is a good place to start. The lawyers can ask the court to rule that it is not a finding, since no one cleaned or X-rayed the bones.

After that comes outside help. That means international forensic specialists and proper laboratory work. It also means X-rays on every skeleton and every piece of metal found with them. Each item needs a written record of who has held it since it left the ground.

And the site has to be guarded until all of this is done.

The court may agree to some of it. It may refuse. A refusal is not wasted effort. It goes into the court record with a date, and it can be quoted later.

A string of refusals shows that a state is unwilling or unable to investigate its own crimes. That is the test the Rome Statute uses before an international court can step in.



Lawyers also need to consider people’s safety. Kaithadi shows why.

In June 2006, gravel miners dug up a body there, on the A9 road close to Chemma'ni. Over the next three days, four bodies came out of the ground. One was a Saiva priest who had gone missing after a temple pooja.

Later, gunmen on a motorbike shot the village officer who had organised that exhumation, NESoHR recorded. He lived. Chemma’ni has seen pressure of its own. There have been claims that CID officers tried to intimidate people working on the exhumation there, and the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances put those claims on record in 2025.

So the lawyers should ask the court to protect people as well as the site. That means witnesses and the officials doing the work. It also means the families. Then there is Rajapakse. ITJP reports that in 2025 he offered to name senior officers if he was released. A man in that position is at real risk, and the state should be the last party to be trusted to keep him safe.



Colombo keeps telling the world to give its domestic process time, and the High Commissioner’s call for the government to “seek” international help gives it that time.

Tamil political actors on the island can answer this with the record.

At Chemma'ni, the domestic process already had a confession, a court order and foreign observers in 1999, and it still came to nothing.

They can ask in SL Parliament who levelled the old cremation ground beside the graves, and where the remains are kept today. They can ask what happened to the 1998 and 1999 files the Justice Minister says are gone.

They can keep families away from the OMP. They can also carry one common demand to the Core Group in Geneva.

Tamil civil groups should insist that DNA samples are collected and stored outside the OMP’s reach. The families’ petition in the TDJC Joint Call already makes this demand.



Civil groups should not drop the main demand on genocide investigation because a funder or an embassy prefers ‘softer language’.

TamilNet’s testimony to the Bremen session of the Peoples’ Tribunal described how that pressure works.

The diaspora can do the most by keeping the evidence safe. Many families of the disappeared now live abroad. So do many Tamil doctors and forensic scientists. No government controls them. In most countries, a government would gather this kind of evidence and protect it for its own people.

The Eezham Tamils have no state of their own to do that, legally or in practice. The diaspora has yet to learn how to do some of that work itself.

Identifying the dead requires records from families as well as the bones, and families can gather that information now. It covers things like what the person wore that day, or old fractures and dental work. The Red Cross uses standard forms for this, called ante-mortem records. Tamil medical professionals abroad could help families fill them out properly, with consent, and keep copies off the island.

Family DNA is harder. A cheek swab is simple, but it only counts if it is taken and stored to a standard a court will accept. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in The Hague has done this for families in Bosnia and Iraq.

The Tamil diaspora could approach it, or a university lab abroad, about holding reference samples until an independent mechanism exists.

Nobody should start a private DNA bank on their own. Poorly handled samples can be thrown out of court and put families at risk.

Forensic experts in the diaspora can also study the interim report and its photographs and put their opinions in writing. The victims’ lawyers can file those in Jaffna. If the court allows it, some of those experts could observe the exhumation for the families.



Media people need to be careful too. Report what the documents say. One inflated number is all Colombo needs to dismiss the rest.

The Vangkaalai skeletons went to Colombo in 1993. The Thirukkeatheesvaram remains went to Anuradhapura. Samples from the 1999 Chemma'ni exhumation went abroad and never returned. No family has been told who their dead were.



Sources:

TamilNet: (artid)

• Krishanthy case and its significance: 7745, 11135
• Sentencing and Rajapakse’s disclosure, 1998: 7394
• Summary of Amnesty’s 1997 report: 381
• Soil tampered with, April 1999: 3104
• 1999 exhumations: 3440, 3441, 3443, 3851, 3859, 3864, 3889, 3948
• Forensic report, December 1999: 4303
• Case moved to Colombo, 2000: 5095
• DNA analysis unfunded, 2001: 5856
• File with the Attorney General, 2002: 7900
• Attorney General holding reports, 2005: 14325, 15280
• Army bid to move the case, 2007: 21942
• Mannaar chronology: 39396, 39379, 39386, 37087, 38219, 38760, 39274
• Pre-2002 incidents: 12515, 3881, 9800, 39188, 5390, 9824, 14997
• TamilNet testimony to the Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka, Session III, Bremen (May 2022)

ITJP:

• International Truth and Justice Project, Chemmani Mass Grave: ‘We Are Still Searching’, July 2026. It cites 58 TamilNet reports, and for several dated events, TamilNet is its only cited source. Its new material rests on the soldiers’ 1998 statements (source on file), the Human Rights Commission’s 2003 Jaffna disappearances committee report, UTHR(J) Report No. 12, court records and 2025 family affidavits.

TDJC:

• Tamil Diaspora Organisations, Joint Call: International Justice Pathways for 2025 to 2027, 5 September 2025. Published as a booklet with Annexes I to VII, 16 September 2025. tamildiaspora.org

Amnesty International:

• ASA 37/24/97 (1997)
• ASA 37/17/99 (1999)
• ASA 37/0125/2025
• IOR 40/0761/2026

UN:

• A/HRC/RES/46/1, para. 6
• A/HRC/63/18, paras. 49 and 54 to 56
• A/HRC/63/G/1, para. 2
• CED/C/LKA/CO/1 (adopted 2 October 2025)
• OHCHR on the accountability project: FAQ, Terms of Reference, March 2025 and April 2026 updates
• UN Special Procedures, communication to the Government of Sri Lanka, July 2025 (as cited by ITJP)
• UN General Assembly resolution 71/248 (2016), establishing the Syria mechanism

Other

• NESoHR, Lest We Forget I (2007) and II (2008)
• Asia Times, March 2019
• Interim excavation report (Somadeva and Wanninayake, 2026)

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Chronology: