Sri Lankan troops back in Haiti without a vetting system, say rights advocates
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Sri Lankan troops have returned to Haiti without any independent human rights vetting mechanism in place, two years after the body responsible for screening them withdrew from the role, the transitional justice expert Yasmin Sooka and the former BBC correspondent Frances Harrison have written.
In an opinion essay for PassBlue, published as the UN Security Council prepares to decide whether to renew the mandate of the Gang Suppression Force in Haiti, the pair argue that the screening of Sri Lankan personnel has been reduced to self-certification by the state whose forces are being assessed.
Sooka is a South African transitional justice expert who investigated allegations that French peacekeepers sexually abused children in the Central African Republic, and heads the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. Harrison, a former BBC correspondent in Sri Lanka, directs the International Truth and Justice Project, which gathers evidence on war crimes and crimes against humanity on the island.
Sri Lanka’s contribution to the force is among the largest, at 900 army personnel and 189 Special Task Force officers, in what has been described as Colombo’s largest ever overseas deployment. The first troops reached Port-au-Prince in July, with a contingent landing at Gonaïves in August as the force expanded into the Artibonite region.
The essay recalls the 2007 UN investigation that found credible allegations implicating at least 134 members of successive Sri Lankan contingents in the sexual exploitation and abuse of Haitian children, some as young as eight. More than 108 personnel were repatriated. Investigators found an organised pattern in which contact details were passed from one rotation to the next, with one boy abused by more than a hundred soldiers, and concluded that commanders “failed to take appropriate action”. No one was prosecuted, and the ITJP found that every contingent commander from those deployments was subsequently promoted.
Since 2016 the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka held a special screening role agreed with the UN, but withdrew from it in June 2024, recording in its lessons-learned report “unwarranted pressure to expedite screening” and “pressure to reconsider its decisions to not clear particular applicants”. No successor mechanism exists. The UN’s proposal, the authors write, would establish an interministerial committee advised by the police and the commission, “again allowing the state to effectively screen its own personnel”.
They note that the official who represented Sri Lanka at a UN roundtable on designing the new mechanism was the deputy defence minister, who according to the Army’s own 2006 annual report was second-in-command of the third Haiti contingent, within the period the UN investigated. That established no personal involvement, they write, but created “an appearance of conflict of interest”.
The essay contrasts this with Bangladesh, where the UN human rights office recommended an independent screening mechanism be established before any personnel were nominated for Haiti. “No equivalent hold preceded Sri Lanka’s deployment,” they write. “Applying the principle selectively turns human rights screening into a matter of political convenience rather than protection against foreseeable harm.”
UNICEF estimates that up to half the members of Haiti’s armed groups are children.
“A contingent whose predecessors sexually exploited and abused Haitian children is being sent to fight an enemy substantially composed of them,” the authors conclude.
Read the full essay here.