Civil Society Disgraced By Choice Of CC Nominees

September 23, 2015

Several human rights activists have condemned the ‘Civil Society’ representatives whose nominations to theConstitutional Council were approved by Parliament yesterday (September 22nd).

Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy and President’s Council Shibly Aziz who will represent the civil society in the Constitutional Council have a lot of baggage that have raised questions over their suitability, good governance activists allege.

The 83 year old Dr Ariyaratne, Leader of the Sarvodaya Movement, has been charged with nepotism, considering that close relatives have been appointed to key positions in his NGO Sarvodaya, the kind of practice that the Government strongly condemned the Rajapaksa regime for promoting

The charges against Dr Coomaraswamy are far more serious. She stands accused of sitting on a key report of an investigation into high profile human rights violations including the killing of five students in Trincomalee in January 2006, purportedly in order to secure Government clearance to take on a top UN post. Ironically she was the UN’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.

The said report was commissioned during the time she sat on the Council. The report, put together by T. Suntheralingam, a retired judge, who acted as the Special Rapporteur of an inquiry into high profile human rights violations.

That report was never made public by the Human Rights Commission or the then Government. It finally entered the public domain when Colombo Telegraph published it in January 2014.

The controversy over the report stemmed from Coomaraswamy’s statements to Colombo Telegraph at the time the website published the report. She insisted in the first instance that the report had not been finalised. She said that neither she nor Dr Deepika Udagama (also a member of the Council) had seen a finalised report before they left the Council. She said “Neither she nor I can remember the contents and if it had been finalized we would surely have remembered.”                    Read More