Sri Lanka’s Peacekeepers Are Back in Haiti. A Vetting System Is Not.
The United Nations Security Council is scheduled to soon decide whether to renew the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) in Haiti, whose mandate expires on Sept. 30. The lead negotiators of the mandate in the Council are the US and Panama.
Sri Lanka’s contribution to the GSF is one of the largest for the militarized operations: 900 Army personnel and 189 paramilitary police from the Special Task Force, according to its Ministry of Defense. At a 2025 force-generation conference, personnel pledges exceeded 7,500 against an authorized ceiling of 5,550. Although pledges are not the same as deployable capacity, Sri Lankan personnel were chosen despite the country’s terrible history in Haiti.
In 2007, a confidential UN investigation found credible allegations, from 2005 to 2007, implicating at least 134 members of successive Sri Lankan contingents in the sexual exploitation and abuse of Haitian children, some as young as eight years old. The UN repatriated more than 108 Sri Lankans in 2007. There is no evidence that anyone was ever prosecuted.
Joint UN and Sri Lankan investigators found an organized pattern: Children sexually exploited and abused for food or a few dollars at virtually every location where the troops were deployed, with contact details passed from one rotation to the next and one boy abused by more than a hundred soldiers. Commanders, the report concluded, “failed to take appropriate action.”
Sri Lanka’s account of what followed shrank from 23 troop members disciplined to nine to three. Nobody was jailed for raping children. The UN Committee Against Torture repeatedly sought details of prosecutions without receiving an answer. No evidence of criminal prosecutions exists, while the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) found that every contingent commander from those deployments was subsequently promoted.
The first Sri Lankan troops operating for the GSF reached Port-au-Prince in July 2026. In August, a contingent landed at Gonaïves as the force expanded operations into the Artibonite region, outside the capital.
UN’s responsibility
The GSF is not a blue-helmet mission: Troops serve under national flags and a non-UN command. Security Council Resolution 2793 established the UN Support Office in Haiti (UNSOH), which provides the force with logistics, medical care and transport. That backing triggers the UN’s Human Rights Due Diligence Policy, requiring UNSOH to assess and mitigate the risk that its support may contribute to grave violations and to withdraw it where safeguards are lacking. Credible screening of the troops is therefore part of the UN’s own obligations.
Under the UN’s general screening policy, contributing states certify their own nationals and each candidate attests that he has committed no violations. For Sri Lanka, this certification was formally recognized as inadequate after a 2015 Office of the High Commission for Human Rights investigation found patterns of conduct in Sri Lanka’s civil war indicating “system crimes.”
Since 2016, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) took on a special screening role that was agreed on with the UN and coordinated with OHCHR, which held confidential material unavailable to the commission. The mechanism was presented as a model for others.
The process was soon circumvented. In 2017, 49 personnel without HRCSL clearance were deployed to the UN peacekeeping mission in South Lebanon (UNIFIL) anyway. The system was tightened after a halt on deployment for a year. Then, in June 2024, the domestic Human Rights Commission withdrew from the vetting and screening role, and in its lessons-learned report records “unwarranted pressure to expedite screening” of peacekeepers and “pressure to reconsider its decisions to not clear particular applicants,” concluding that OHCHR’s involvement “remains important.”
No credible replacement
Two years on, there is no successor to the domestic vetting and screening system for Sri Lankan peacekeepers. The proposal as outlined by the UN suggests setting up an interministerial committee advised by the Sri Lanka police and the human rights commission, again allowing the state to effectively screen its own personnel. It remains unclear who would staff the new vetting body, whether an adverse finding would bind anyone and whether commanders as well as direct perpetrators would be assessed or how it could lawfully receive confidential OHCHR evidence provided by victims of the very institutions being screened.
Interim screening of the Sri Lankan contingent for the GSF in Haiti has reportedly relied on information supplied by the Sri Lankan authorities, diplomatic checks and self-declaration. The US Embassy in Haiti’s rejection of at least one candidate under the Leahy Law vetting requirements is not reassuring as it reveals that names with known problems were put forward.
And the man representing the government at the October 2025 UN roundtable on Sri Lanka’s role in building a new mechanism for peacekeeping was the deputy minister of defense, who according to the Army’s own 2006 annual report was second-in-command of the third Haiti contingent, inside the period the UN investigated.
That did not establish personal involvement, but it created an appearance of conflict of interest if he helps design or certify a process examining the contingents’ command failures.
The contrast with the Bangladesh contingent to the GSF is instructive. In February 2025, OHCHR recommended that Bangladesh establish “an effective and sufficiently independent human rights screening mechanism” before nominating anyone for the Haitian operation. No equivalent hold preceded Sri Lanka’s deployment to Haiti, or the 112 soldiers it sent to UNIFIL three days earlier.
Applying the principle selectively turns human rights screening into a matter of political convenience rather than protection against foreseeable harm.
The UN recorded four substantiated cases of sexual exploitation and abuse by the Kenyan-led predecessor mission in Haiti in 2025. Sri Lanka’s troops are now at the same forward bases in the Artibonite region. 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.
Yasmin Sooka is a South African transitional justice expert who investigated allegations that French peacekeepers sexually abused children in the Central African Republic. She currently heads the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan.
Sri Lanka’s Peacekeepers Are Back in Haiti. A Vetting System Is Not.