COLOMBO: A US-backed resolution at the United Nations that seeks justice for victims of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war has been softened to keep its government on board and allay the concerns of powerful neighbor India, sources say.

The latest draft, expected to be adopted in Geneva on Thursday, fails to specify the powers and role of foreign prosecutors and judges in trying war crimes suspects — a major shortcoming, in the eyes of human rights groups. They and some diplomats say that reflects the balancing act needed to keep Sri Lanka’s new reformist leadership on board while making a credible attempt to end a culture of impunity over what the UN calls the mass killings of tens of thousands of people by both sides in the final stages of the conflict.

“Everything now depends on implementation — the text was worded in a very ambiguous way,” said Alan Keenan, Sri Lanka analyst at the International Crisis Group.

A judicial process with teeth would hold out a realistic prospect of punishment for senior figures in ex-president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government and military, as well as Tamil Tiger rebels, who waged a bitter final battle in 2009. The UN has estimated that 40,000 people died, many of them civilians, as government forces tightened the noose around a patch of land on the Jaffna Peninsula where Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels were penned in.

But the US-led draft agreed with the Sri Lankan government falls short of explicitly meeting a call by the UN’s human rights chief for a special court staffed with international judges, prosecutors, lawyers and investigators.

Such “hybrid” courts have emerged in recent years as a way to deliver justice in places such as East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone against powerful individuals capable of threatening judges or witnesses.

The text instead vaguely affirms the importance of participation in a Sri Lankan judicial mechanism of “Commonwealth and other foreign judges, defense lawyers, and authorized prosecutors and investigators.”