This week, as they have done at almost every session of the UN Human Rights Council since the war ended seventeen years ago, Sri Lanka's representatives once again stood in the Palais des Nations to defend the country's record, appeal for patience and ask that its efforts be judged fairly. The Office of the High Commissioner once again presented its written update. The Government once again objected to the external mechanism set up to gather evidence outside the country's own institutions. And somewhere between Colombo and Geneva, the actual business of reconciliation, the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding trust between communities, was once again left waiting in the corridor.

This newspaper has watched this ritual repeat itself, resolution after resolution, session after session, for the better part of a decade. It is worth asking, plainly, what the cycle has actually achieved for the people it claims to serve. The honest answer is not much, and there is a growing case that the ritual itself, not merely its outcome, has become part of the problem. Far from advancing reconciliation, the annual Geneva exchange increasingly looks like a mechanism for freezing the very positions it was meant to soften.

Consider what each session actually produces at home. In the south, every mention of an "external mechanism" is seized upon by those who have long argued that reconciliation is a foreign imposition rather than a Sri Lankan need, proof, in their telling, that the whole project is being conducted at the country's expense rather than for its benefit. That argument gets a fresh airing every September, and every September it hardens a little further, regardless of which government is in office or how sincere its intentions.

In the north and the east, the effect runs the other way but towards the same result. Families who have waited years for word of the missing hear, once again, that the Council has "noted" the Government's efforts and "urged" further progress, and once again, nothing changes in the register office or the courtroom. Each unfulfilled promise, repeated at a fresh session under a fresh minister, deepens the conviction that Colombo's engagement with Geneva is theatre, performed for an international audience rather than conducted for their benefit. That conviction is itself a form of division, and arguably a more corrosive one than anything a resolution can address.

The deeper problem is one of audience. When a Government's central reconciliation statement each year is drafted for delivery in Geneva, the incentive is to satisfy the Council, not the country. Diplomatic capital that might go into explaining reform to a sceptical public in Colombo, or building confidence with a grieving family in Mullaitivu, goes instead into managing a foreign forum. Sri Lanka ends up conducting its most important domestic conversation with an audience of ambassadors, not with itself, and a conversation held over the heads of the people it concerns is unlikely to heal much of anything.

The measures Ambassador Dassanayake set out this week, repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, reform of the Online Safety Act, the continuing work of the Office on Missing Persons and the Office for Reparations, matter far more than anything said in Geneva ever will. They matter because they are visible to the people who live with their consequences, not because they satisfy a reporting requirement. If reconciliation is genuinely a domestic project, as every Sri Lankan government since the war has insisted it must be, the country's political energy belongs in Vavuniya, in Kalmunai, in Colombo's own Parliament, not in rebutting a report that will simply be renewed again next year regardless of what Sri Lanka says about it now.

None of this is an argument that scrutiny has been baseless. Victims' groups and rights defenders have their own reasons, born of decades of unmet promises, for treating Geneva as one of the few levers still available to them, and that scepticism has been earned rather than invented. But the answer to earned scepticism cannot be another year of the same exchange. It has to be delivery convincing enough that the lever stops being necessary.

Sri Lanka does not need a better rebuttal for next September. It needs to make the rebuttal unnecessary, by closing the distance between what is promised in Geneva and what is felt back home, in every other place still waiting for the war to properly end. Until that happens, the country will keep returning to the same room, making the same case, to the same effect: not reconciliation advanced, but the rift kept exactly where it was found, and perhaps a little deeper for having been argued over once more.