Testing Time For United Nations & Sri Lanka
By Thambu Kanagasabai –June 14, 2016
Thambu Kanagasabai
How much longer can Sri Lanka, albeit old or new regime, cajole and fool the United Nations? While the world awaits with bated breath for the United Nations High Commissioner’s oral report on Sri Lanka, this article endeavours to list in brief the various United Nations Panels’ core findings from 2010 – 2016 as well as the findings of other international human rights agencies which conducted their own investigations as to the commissions and omissions of Sri Lanka’s security forces from 2006 – 2010 including various comments and statements of dignitaries and world leaders – only to show how much resources, time and energy has been invested so far and how much substantive proof has emerged with no avail!
In his opening remarks at the 32nd session of the UN Human Rights Council, underway today June 13, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, His Excellency Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, had a paragraph on Sri Lanka:
“In Sri Lanka, the government’s efforts to implement its commitments in Resolution 30/1 will require a comprehensive strategy on transitional justice that enables it to pursue different processes in a coordinated, integrated and appropriately sequenced manner. This will require the inclusive and meaningful engagement of all Sri Lankans. I will present an oral update later in the session.”
Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein – The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
It’s a general statement that has nothing new that hasn’t been said before; very little will be gained by decoding it; except that we got confirmation that the High Commissioner is scheduled to give his ‘oral report’ on Sri Lanka, “later in the session.”
Much rests on what the High Commissioner would say in this much awaited oral report. Will he relent yet again when Sri Lanka, even under the new regime, the co- sponsor of the UN HRC resolution passed at the 30th session, has done nothing substantive to deliver on its promises. In fact the government has rejected any question of involving any foreign judges in any domestic inquiry it contemplates – a domestic inquiry that it has done nothing about.
The armed struggle by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam which commenced in 1976 with the failure of peaceful struggles initiated in 1956 by the past Tamil political leaders, reached its climax in the Eelam war IV from 2006 – 2009.
