This article shows how queering transitional justice in Sri Lanka exposes the enduring (neo)colonial debris embedded in the country’s legal, institutional, and moral systems.
By centering the landmark case Rosanna Flamer-Caldera v. Sri Lanka (CEDAW, 2022), it highlights how colonial-era laws that criminalize consensual same-sex relationships continue to function as tools of postcolonial control, exclusion, and moral regulation.
Written by S. Arzooman Chowdhury, the article challenges dominant approaches to transitional justice in Sri Lanka that focus narrowly on wartime atrocities while ignoring structural and identity-based harms that persist long after conflict ends.
It argues that colonial legality and heteronormative nationalism still shape Sri Lanka’s justice mechanisms, determining whose suffering is recognized and whose lives remain unseen.
The article reads CEDAW as a parallel site of justice, showing how international human rights law and transitional justice are not separate paths, but interconnected and ongoing struggles for recognition, dignity, and belonging.
Rosanna Flamer-Caldera’s petition emerges not only as a personal legal victory, but as a powerful act of resistance that exposes the limits of state-centered justice and the moral hierarchies that continue to govern post-war Sri Lanka.
Rather than treating transitional justice as a fixed, institutional process, the article reimagines it as a living, transformative practice, one that must confront colonial legacies, patriarchy, and heteronormativity to become truly inclusive.
In doing so, it calls for a queered, decolonial vision of justice that recognizes everyday structural violence and affirms the humanity of those long pushed to the margins.