As the UN Human Rights Council begins its first meeting of 2021 in Geneva, high on its crowded agenda will be to decide whether to adopt a new resolution that maintains international oversight over Sri Lanka. The present one, adopted in 2015 but now expiring, won support from the Sri Lankan government of the time, which agreed to address the legacy of the country’s brutal civil war and its conclusion in a wave of atrocities in 2009. But Sri Lanka’s current government, led by the same nationalist politicians and generals who were in office at the war’s end, has rejected the truth and accountability agenda it inherited and is working hard to end the Council’s engagement. With options for truth and justice for wartime atrocities closed for now within Sri Lanka, the Council should adopt a new resolution that underscores the international interest in accountability. At the same time, the accountability agenda, which has dominated international discussions about post-war Sri Lanka over the last decade, must not divert attention from the current government’s authoritarian and ethnically exclusionary policies, which may well be sowing the seeds of future violence. The new resolution should thus also focus on preventing a return to violence and be followed by a sustained international effort to persuade the Sri Lankan government to pull back from its dangerous trajectory.