By Matthew Russell Lee UNITED NATIONS, May 25 — With UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon yet to even transmit his Panel of Experts report on war crimes in Sri Lanka to the UN in Geneva, a General who features prominently in the report, Shavendra Silva, met this week with Ban’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations.
Inner City Press asked Ban’s spokesman Martin Nesirky about Shavendra Silva’s appearance in the report, and at the agreement signing with UN DPKO. Nesirky replied that “the primary responsibility of ensuring that nations meet the highest standards of integrity lies with member states… we insist with member states that they should contribute personnel who have not committed human rights violations.” Since it is rare, particularly in Sri Lanka, for government to admit its personnel have committed any rights violations, this seems like a weak policy. Silva, Wimal & Kohona at UN this month, DPKO signing not shown (c) MRLee Nesirky went on to say that the UN does its own screening of “uniformed personnel… senior staff and experts.” Inner City Press asked if the UN does any screening of those with whom it signs agreements related to its peacekeeping. That is, did the UN screen Silva? Nesirky said it was an agreement with a country, not an individual. We’ll see. ——————————————————————————————————-
Lawyers for Democracy Urges Independent Verification of Facts contained in UN Report on Sri Lanka; Asks for Professional Responses
(Lanka-e-News -25.May.2011, 11.40AM) The war in the North and East has come to an end. Due to the blanket censorship on conflict related news, local and international media did not have the freedom to cover the conflict. Consequently,the public only received one sided information and in general, the public was kept in the dark. In the absence of independent access for journalists, the sources of information were the military and the LTTE, both of whom were obviously biased. Full story » 