Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- 1 Do Tigers Confess?
- 2 Rebellion and Martyrdom
- 3 Facts, Falsities, and Fictions
- 4 Punitive Interrogation of Tamil Tiger Suspects
- 5 Judgement of the Terrorist Against the ‘Formula of Justice’
- 6 Fantasies, Fictions, Myths, and Denials about Tamil Tigers’ Confessions
- Appendix
- Acronyms
- Acknowledgements
- About the author
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Do Tigers Confess?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- 1 Do Tigers Confess?
- 2 Rebellion and Martyrdom
- 3 Facts, Falsities, and Fictions
- 4 Punitive Interrogation of Tamil Tiger Suspects
- 5 Judgement of the Terrorist Against the ‘Formula of Justice’
- 6 Fantasies, Fictions, Myths, and Denials about Tamil Tigers’ Confessions
- Appendix
- Acronyms
- Acknowledgements
- About the author
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), also known as the ‘Tamil Tigers’, had been engaged in war with the Government of Sri Lanka for nearly three decades. During this time, the government has been fighting a legal battle using counter-terrorism laws to punish the Tigers in the courts. Among other unprecedented measures, these laws have allowed the prosecutors to submit as evidence in courts confessions supposedly given by the Tamil Tigers. This legal war can be defined as a mass prosecution strategy, because thousands of Tamil Tiger suspects have been prosecuted on the basis of confessionary evidence. The key elements of this mass prosecution strategy are: (a) arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention of large numbers of suspects until the conclusion of their trials, (b) the use of confessions recorded by police officers as sole evidence, and (c) the transfer of the burden of proof onto the accused to disprove the voluntariness of their confessions. By adopting these draconian measures, the state has made exceptions to ordinary law in order to combat terrorism, bureaucratising certain parts of the criminal justice system by giving discretionary powers to public officers to arrest, detain, interrogate and prosecute suspects. This research presents the proposition that the elements of the mass prosecution strategy suppress the rule of law, justice, truth and human rights; therefore, this strategy substantiates the claims of the discrimination, persecution and unjust punishment of suspected terrorists in Sri Lanka. By posing the question, ‘Do Tigers confess?’, this project intends to establish the validity or otherwise of the Tigers’ confessions, by investigating them from a range of viewpoints within the broader context of the war against terrorism, posing a number of questions: What attributes of the LTTE military subculture either support or dispute the fact that Tigers have confessed en masse? Can the authenticity of these confessions be determined by linguistic and narrative analysis methods? How have the state's agents enforced the counter-terrorism measures among the suspect population, and how do such measures impact on individual suspects? What are the possibilities and limits of a fair hearing for Tigers from the judiciary in Sri Lanka?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Use of Confessionary Evidence under the Counter-Terrorism Laws of Sri LankaAn Interdisciplinary Study, pp. 9 - 56Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017