UN Team is Strong: Ex-Lankan Envoy

By P K Balachandran- 27th June 2014 

COLOMBO: The three-member panel of experts appointed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, to “advice and support” the team she had set up to inquire into rights violations in Sri Lanka, is “very strong” says Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, a leading Sri Lankan political commentator and former Ambassador to the UN in Geneva.

“The UN fact finding mission on the Gaza conflict had only one person - Richard Goldstone - but the inquiry panel on Sri Lanka is a troika. It is very strong, and  heavily front-end loaded,” Jayatilleka told Express on Thursday.

Asma Jahangir

The Lankan panel has Martti Ahtisaari (former President of Finland, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and an international expert in peace building); Dame Silvia Cartwright (former Governor General of New Zealand and a judge in the Cambodian war crimes court); and Asma Jahangir (leading Pakistani lawyer and a former holder of several UN human rights mandates).

The 12-member investigative team of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) will have investigators, forensic experts, a gender specialist, a legal analyst, and others with special skills. It is expected to complete its work by mid-April 2015.

The team is mandated to conduct a “comprehensive investigation” of incidents of rights violations by both the Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the period covered by the Lankan government’s own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), ie: from February 21, 2002, when the ill-fated Ceasefire Agreement was signed; to May 19, 2009, when the LTTE was militarily defeated.

Drone Strike

The team will also “monitor” the rights situation in post-war Lanka and “assess” progress on domestic reconciliation processes. This suggests that the panel will look into the recent anti-Muslim riots in Aluthgama. Within days after Navi Pillay condemned the riots and called upon Colombo to “protect all religious minorities” she appointed Asma Jahangir to the investigation panel. Jayatilleka described this as a “diplomatic drone strike against Sri Lanka.”

In 2005, Jahangir had done a report for the UNHRC on religious freedom in Lanka, in which she said that there was a “deterioration of religious tolerance and absence of appropriate action by the government which have brought respect of freedom of religion or belief to an unsatisfactory level.”