IV 
118TH CONGRESS 
2D SESSION 
H. RES. 1230 
Recognizing the hundreds of thousands of lives lost during Sri Lanka’s 
almost 30-year armed conflict, which ended 15 years ago on May 18, 
2009, and ensuring nonrecurrence of past violence, including the Tamil 
Genocide, by supporting the right to self-determination of Eelam Tamil 
people and their call for an independence referendum for a lasting peace-
ful resolution. 
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
MAY 15, 2024 
Mr. NICKEL (for himself, Ms. WILD, Mr. DAVIS of Illinois, Ms. MALLIOTAKIS, 
Mr. CAREY, Mr. DAVIS of North Carolina, Ms. LEE of Pennsylvania, and 
Mr. JACKSON of North Carolina) submitted the following resolution; 
which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs 
RESOLUTION 
Recognizing the hundreds of thousands of lives lost during 
Sri Lanka’s almost 30-year armed conflict, which ended 
15 years ago on May 18, 2009, and ensuring nonrecur-
rence of past violence, including the Tamil Genocide, 
by supporting the right to self-determination of Eelam 
Tamil people and their call for an independence ref-
erendum for a lasting peaceful resolution. 
Whereas May 18, 2024, marks the 15-year anniversary of the 
end of the 26-year armed conflict between the Govern-
ment of Sri Lanka and various armed Tamil independ-
ence organizations; 
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•HRES 1230 IH 
Whereas the Sinhalese people and the Eelam Tamil people 
have lived on the island presently known as Sri Lanka for 
thousands of years and lived in separate and sovereign 
Sinhalese and Tamil kingdoms, and in 1833, the Sin-
halese and the Tamil territories were merged under a sin-
gle unitary administration by the British; 
Whereas all major Tamil political parties united under the 
Tamil United Liberation Front and adopted the 
Vaddukoddai Resolution on May 14, 1976, asserting the 
right to self-determination of the Tamil nation and call-
ing for the restoration and reconstitution of an inde-
pendent, free, sovereign, secular Tamil Eelam as the so-
lution to the Tamils, and in the subsequent election 
which the Tamils treated as a model referendum, the 
Tamil people gave their overwhelming electoral mandate 
for the independent, free, sovereign Tamil Eelam; 
Whereas the 6th amendment to Sri Lanka’s constitution, in-
troduced in 1983, was targeted towards the Eelam Tamil 
people to limit their ability to advocate for their inde-
pendence, and to criminalize such activity, thus the 
amendment infringes on the Tamils’ freedom of expres-
sion which is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of 
Human Rights; 
Whereas, subsequent to the persistent calls by the inter-
national community to resolve the ethnic conflict, Sri 
Lanka, without any consultations with the Eelam Tamils, 
unilaterally introduced the 13th amendment to the con-
stitution in 1987, which claimed to be a solution to the 
conflict but which was rejected by the Eelam Tamil polit-
ical leaders as not meeting the aspirations of their people, 
and their homeland still remains as non-self-governing 
territory; 
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•HRES 1230 IH 
Whereas Richard Boucher, then-Assistant Secretary of State 
for South and Central Asian Affairs, acknowledged dur-
ing a visit to wartime Sri Lanka on June 1, 2006, that 
‘‘There are legitimate issues that are raised by the Tamil 
community, and they have a very legitimate desire, as 
anybody would, to be able to control their own lives, to 
rule their own destinies and to govern themselves in their 
homeland; in the areas they’ve traditionally inhabited.’’; 
Whereas, in a joint statement by the United Nations Sec-
retary General and the President of Sri Lanka following 
the Secretary General’s visit to Sri Lanka in May 2009, 
Sri Lanka gave assurance to find a lasting political solu-
tion addressing the aspirations and grievances of all com-
munities and to an accountability process for addressing 
violations of international humanitarian and human 
rights law; 
Whereas the United States cosponsored the United Nations 
Human Rights Council Resolution, HRC 51/L.1 (2022), 
which emphasizes the importance of elections and ref-
erendums to strengthen the democratic process, calls 
upon the Government of Sri Lanka to fulfill its commit-
ments to the devolution of political authority, and extends 
and reinforces the capacity of the Office of the High 
Commissioner for Human Rights to collect, consolidate, 
analyze, and preserve information and evidence, and to 
develop possible strategies for future accountability proc-
esses; 
Whereas the January 2021 report from the United Nations 
High Commissioner for Human Rights warns that ‘‘Sri 
Lanka’s current trajectory sets the scene for the recur-
rence of the policies and practices that gave rise to grave 
human rights violations’’ and ‘‘Given the demonstrated 
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•HRES 1230 IH 
inability and unwillingness of the Government to advance 
accountability at the national level, it is time for inter-
national action’’; 
Whereas, 15 years after the end of the war, the traditional 
homeland of the Eelam Tamils remains heavily milita-
rized by Sri Lanka, while Sri Lanka engages in land ap-
propriation in Tamil territory and the destruction of 
Tamils’ heritage sites and war cemeteries, the root cause 
of the ethnic war has so far not been resolved, and Sri 
Lanka, despite numerous commitments, has not made 
enough progress toward accountability, justice, and polit-
ical solution, nor has it taken sufficient measures to 
guarantee the nonrecurrence of the past patterns of viola-
tions against the Eelam Tamil people; and 
Whereas similar conflicts have successfully been democrat-
ically, peacefully, and legally resolved by exercising the 
right to self-determination by the people in countries 
such as South Sudan, Montenegro, East Timor, Bosnia, 
Eritrea, and Kosovo via independence referendums with 
support from the United States and other countries: 
Now, therefore, be it 
Resolved, That the House of Representatives— 
(1) urges the United States to strengthen diplo-
matic channels with the Eelam Tamils and collabo-
rate toward peace and stability in the South Asian 
region of the Indo-Pacific; 
(2) urges the United States and the inter-
national community to advocate for and protect the 
political rights of the Eelam Tamil people and work 
toward a permanent political solution based on their 
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•HRES 1230 IH 
right to self-determination that is democratically and 
peacefully approved by them through a universally 
accepted process of independence referendum; and 
(3) recognizes the genocide against the Eelam 
Tamil people by Sri Lanka. 
Æ 
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