What is not settled, and what would settle it

§1 Open questions

• How deep is Tamil historical continuity in the Northern and Eastern Provinces under independent research conditions? This question is treated in the academic literature (Indrapala 2005, Sivathamby, Gunawardana 1979) and is canonically open. TLTE takes no position.
• How should Buddhist remains in Tamil-majority regions be interpreted? Possibilities include Sinhala-Buddhist, Tamil-Buddhist, mixed-community, monastic-trading-network, and re-use stratigraphies. The answer is methodological, not declarative.
• What was the role of Tamil-speaking Buddhists in early-medieval Lanka? Indrapala 2005 and the broader bilingual-religious-culture literature treat this as open.
• What did British officials at the time know about Tamil constitutional vulnerability before and after the 1944–47 transfer of power? The Soulbury record, FCO 141, CO 54 / CO 537 can answer this — but the consolidation does not yet exist.
• What practical repair mechanisms can Britain support without destabilising the wider region? This is a UK policy question, not a TLTE drafting question.
• What is the right relationship, in the present era, between UK reparative obligations and other states (India, EU, Norway, US, Canada, Australia) with their own historical engagement with the Sri Lankan situation?
• Does the Mau Mau 2013 architecture extend doctrinally to non-administered-counter-insurgency colonial-administrative failures, or is it limited to the direct-administration fact pattern? UK academic legal scholarship has not settled this.

The deepest open question — the layered formation of Tamil identity in pre-modern Lanka — is treated on its own page at /research/formation-question. It is intentionally outside the Civic Repair policy spine: the policy case stands on tier-A 20th-century constitutional record, not on contested antiquity.

§2 Falsifiability conditions

• F01If the Soulbury Commission record can be shown to contain a recorded Tamil acceptance of unitary unentrenched constitutional arrangements — the decolonisation-gap argument fails.
• F02If Section 29(2) of the 1946 Constitution can be shown to have been removed by a process meeting contemporary entrenched-clause standards — the decolonisation-gap argument fails.
• F03If a Ceylon-specific FCO 141 / CO 54 consolidated finding aid is shown already to exist at TNA — the archival-truth ask is delivered, not pending.
• F04If FCDO and Home Office, after open published assessment, find that the Ceylon transfer-of-power record is structurally incompatible with the BN(O) / Ukraine / ARAP precedent architecture — the mobility-principles argument fails, and the Civic Repair case continues on its remaining pillars.
• F05If a UK-university-hosted Tamil-led research institution under international academic standards is shown to be already in operation with the four-capacity remit set out under Research & Truth — the research-institution ask is delivered, not pending.
• F06If the documented multi-community pattern of dispossession (PEARL, Oakland, CPA, OHCHR) can be shown to have been reversed at scale during the present era — the partnership ask is reframed to maintenance rather than construction.
• F07If the UK Mau Mau settlement is shown by competent legal scholarship to have no precedent reach beyond direct-administration fact patterns — the precedent argument is narrowed to the disclosure and protection-route precedents, and the recognition precedent is withdrawn.

§3 Hard refusals

• ◇TLTE does not name perpetrators, survivors, or families of the disappeared.
• ◇TLTE does not aggregate disappearance, CRSV, fisher-incident, land-occupation, or any other contested count in its own voice.
• ◇TLTE does not deliver legal aid, safeguarding, governance training, emergency support, or any other operational service.
• ◇TLTE does not pre-judge the constitutional future of the island.
• ◇TLTE does not glorify any armed group (UK Terrorism Act 2000 §12).
• ◇TLTE does not represent Tamils or speak for any community. It publishes a citation-anchored civic argument under the TLTE Continuity Protocol.