Daniel Flitton
October 3, 2011
Kathy Klugman has been criticised for presenting Sri Lankan awards.
A TOP Australian diplomat has handed out certificates to alleged Tamil rebels after they were put through two years of official ''rehabilitation'' at camps run by the Sri Lankan government.
In a move condemned by a leading international law advocate, Australia's high commissioner to Sri Lanka, Kathy Klugman, took part in a ceremony in Colombo on Friday to release about 1800 Tamils after what the military called ''a two-year rehabilitation program''. But John Dowd - president of the International Commission of Jurists in Australia and former New South Wales attorney-general - condemned the program in the camps as ''re-education, not rehabilitation''.
He warned that Australia was lending legitimacy to a regime that refuses to allow an investigation of alleged war crimes during the country's vicious civil war.
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