For ICC, EU, US and Sri Lanka's readers, the following note from an independent observer, sums up the state of judiciary in Sri Lanka, and WHY citizens CANNOT rely on the judiciary for justice, equality, and redress for State violations.

Alan Keenan, then a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow in Peace and Conflict Studies and a visiting assistant professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College, US has this to say in his summer 2005 essay in Boston Review on the conduct of Sri Lanka Supreme Court judges sitting to adjudicate the Bindinuwewa massacre:

"...the principal responsibility for the massacres of course lies with the Sri Lankan state, and here, despite years of studying and living in Sri Lanka, I was in for an unexpected shock. Last August I attended one of the final Bindunuwewa appeals hearings. Held before a five-member bench of the supreme court, the justices—addressed by counsel as “your lordships” and adorned in dark red judicial robes and stiff white collars—had all the markings of decorum. At previous hearings earlier in the summer I had been disturbed by the apparent sympathy of most of the justices for the arguments of the lawyer for the second police officer convicted of murder. (The first had earlier been acquitted when the prosecution admitted that its evidence against him was insufficient.) But the final hearing was truly shocking. As the solicitor general repeatedly referred to the ways the Tamil inmates had been murdered—“beaten, stabbed, and some even roasted alive” he would say with a flourish—one of the justices began to mock his emphasis on the word “roasted.” This brought much laughter from the other justices and the defense lawyers, and even, most disturbingly, from the government lawyers themselves.

This conduct was only the most grotesque example of the judges’ utter disdain for the crimes under consideration and for the state’s responsibility to determine the truth. The proceedings were filled with bad jokes and undignified behavior, lacked any sense of gravity of the case, and indicated no awareness of the state’s obligation to protect the inmates whatever their political sympathies.

Sitting quietly and scribbling in my notebook, I felt overcome with the desire to pick up a gun and join the Tigers. I could only imagine how Sri Lankan Tamils would feel. But the only Tamil in the hearing room that day was my friend and sometime translator, who had lived virtually her entire life outside of Sri Lanka. Not one justice, not one lawyer, not one courtroom observer—as far as I could tell—was Tamil.

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