For decades the civil and ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka have provided an easy justification for successive governments to maintain a state of emergency in dealing with threats to the State. Since the country's independence in 1948, emergency laws have framed a pervasive culture of impunity for state agents who commit violations. State terror and non-state counter-terror activities have resulted in the remorseless deterioration of civil liberties, particularly of the youth.

Two conflicts in Sri Lanka have resulted in young men and women being primary targets of state terror:

1. • Two youth insurrections in the South between the radical Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and the State, first in the 70s and again, more radically, in the late 80s and;

2. • A three decade conflict in the north and east between the LTTE of predominantly Tamil ethnicity and State forces of the Sri Lankan Government.

Their plight has not yet been redressed even though considerable time has passed since the conflict ended.

Impunity is deeply imbedded in Sri Lanka's history. Since independence, many have questioned Sri Lanka's political leadership and their commitment to basic fundamentals of democracy, beyond a cynical bowing to labels and titles. Power was transferred at the turn of independence from colonial rule to the Western educated, urbanized elite. As a result, Sri Lanka's political leaders had no interest in pursuing genuine cultural or sociopolitical reform. Furthermore, safeguards for various minority groups carefully put in place by the departing colonial rulers in the Independence Constitution of 1948 as well as the constitutional right to life were soon discarded.

The legitimacy of the law in enforcing the accountability of the Sri Lankan State has remained, up until today, severely undermined by a persistent political rationale that has unequivocally rejected the notion of legal accountability. 20 years after the Constitution was enacted the Supreme Court attempted to address some of these issues. However, such jurisprudence had little impact on a society where the overwhelming power of the Executive Presidency had already reduced the judiciary itself to an actor of small consequence in the political context. These judgments therefore remained confined to theory only.