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 with over 150 new pages traces the ongoing engagement in the Sri Lankan conflict of the author, 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. 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. A seminal lecture in the book outlines the legal basis for the Tamils in Sri Lanka to exercise their right under international law to proclaim a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and establish a Provisional Government for Tamil Eelam if that is their desire. Here Boyle draws upon his experience as the Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization on their 15 November 1988 Declaration of Independence and their establishment of the State of Palestine, which recently announced the intention to’ petition for membership in the United Nations Organization. In addition to Boyle’s writings on aspects of international law related to Sri Lanka’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against Tamils, and the international community’s failure to stop the slaughter of Tamil civilians, the book also contains relevant articles from international conventions directly applicable to the conflict, including the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the Genocide Convention.
