In the Shadow of Transitional Justice: Cross-National Perspectives on the Transformative Potential of Remembrance by Guy Elcheroth & Neloufer de Mel

Author:Guy Elcheroth & Neloufer de Mel [Elcheroth, Guy & Mel, Neloufer de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367765101
Google: Mu19zgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 58213726
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

9 Rural women and their access to the law

Gendering the promise of post-war justice

Neloufer de Mel and Danushka Medawatte

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167280-12

Introduction

At the heart of Sri Lanka’s nearly three-decade-long civil war (1983–2009) between the Sri Lankan state’s armed forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) over the formation of a separate state of Tamil Eelam, were women with a variety of experiences of the war. Some were combatants, administrative and nursing officers in the LTTE’s “Birds of Freedom” women’s military wing or the Sri Lanka army’s Women’s Corps. Others were part of the LTTE’s elite “Black Tiger” suicide squad. Numerically more significant, however, are the women of Tamil, Muslim and Sinhala ethnicity who survived, bearing the brunt of the war and its aftermath, as war widows, of whom there are an estimated 89,000 (Witting et al. 2016). In the former war zones of the north and east, many Tamil and Muslim women are also heads of households where livelihoods have been destroyed by the war (International Crisis Group 2017). They are also victim-survivors of conflict-related domestic and sexual violence, mothers, wives or sisters of family members who were forcibly disappeared, and caregivers to those disabled in the war if not disabled themselves. Women living in these areas as well as in the contiguous border villages also face multiple internal displacements – an estimated 80% of the displaced population were women (Satkunanathan 2018). The pervasive militarization of these areas has also meant restricted mobility and insecurity for women (de Mel 2017; Satkunanathan 2018). As a result of these experiences, women are also at the forefront of calls for transitional justice and accountability for war crimes, particularly in the north and east, through membership of associations such as Families of the Disappeared, Women’s Action Network, Maatram, Affected Women’s Forum, Suriya Women’s Development Centre and the Trincomalee Women’s Network, to name but a few.

Sri Lanka’s justice system has, by and large, failed these women. It is plagued with issues that deter them from accessing it freely. Distance to courts of law, poor public transportation particularly in rural areas, low levels of legal literacy and high legal costs obstruct access to justice in general for both men and women (Jayasundere and Valters 2014). Women face additional barriers, such as less access to information, greater restrictions to mobility and cultural attitudes that deter them from the judicial process (Jayasundere and Valters 2014). Inadequate gender mainstreaming within the law has resulted, moreover, in judicial bias against women (evident in the misogynist stereotypes contained in legislative enactments)1 and the consideration of women as unreliable witnesses in evidence procedures (Abeywardena 2016, pp. 37–44; Fonseka and Schulz 2018; de Mel and Samararatne 2017; Medawatte 2020; Centre for Equality and Justice 2018). These prejudices impact adversely on principles of equality and equity supposedly at the heart of the law. As such, they also have implications for the execution of transitional justice in Sri Lanka.

In relation to war-related harm, there have been only a few prosecutions to date, whether for conflict-related

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.