The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka: The Global Failure to Protect Tamil Rights Under International Law

Sri Lanka’s government declared victory in May, 2009, in one of the world’s most intractable wars after a series of battles in which it killed the leader of the Tamil Tigers, who had been fighting to create a separate homeland for the country’s ethnic Tamil minority. The United Nations said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in Sri Lanka since full-scale civil war broke out in 1983. This second edition traces the ongoing engagement in the Sri Lankan conflict of Professor Francis A. Boyle, an eminent American expert in international law, from the conflict’s last years to the present pursuit of UN recognition of the Tamil genocide and call for reparations. It is the first book to develop an authoritative case for genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka under international law. Such charges by an expert like Boyle should not be taken lightly: In 1993, Boyle took the remarkably similar case of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the International Court of Justice, setting a historical precedent by winning not one, but two Orders from the Court against the rump Yugoslavia. Professor Boyle was among the very few to address the international legal implications of the Sri Lankan Government’s grave and systematic violations of Tamil human rights while the conflict was actually taking place, and to excoriate the UN and those significant states and actors in the global community whose failure to prevent it, Boyle charges, amounted to complicity in genocide.