Catholics Deserting GOP's Trump More Than Any Other Group

Pope Francis (Alberto Pizzoli/Getty Images)

By Eric Mack-Sunday, 28 Aug 2016

Considering Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign against President Barack Obama and Donald Trump's recent polls figures cited by The Washington Post, the Republican presidential nominee has a bigger voter issue than females, blacks, Hispanics and young voters: the Catholic vote.

The paper reported the relative shift of Catholics from the Republican candidate in '12 to Hillary Clinton now is more than any other demographic currently.

"Catholics have long been a swing vote in presidential elections, and right now they're swinging hard for Clinton," The Post's Aaron Blake wrote.

"It's also hard to overstate just how significant Trump's poor performance among Catholics is. That's because they comprise about 1/4 of voters in the United States (25 percent in 2012 exit polls) and are about as big a voting bloc as non-whites (28 percent) and independents (29 percent)."

Pope Francis and Trump notoriously feuded during the Republican primary season in February, as Pope Francis said Trump is "not Christian" for his views on immigration.

Trump shot back it was "disgraceful" for a religious leader to question his faith.

"If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS's ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened," Trump said in a statement.

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Colombia Farc rebels announce definitive ceasefire

The Farc has been fighting since 1964 in a conflict that has displaced millions

28 August 2016

The main leftist rebel group in Colombia, the Farc, has ordered all its fighters to observe a ceasefire from midnight local time (05:00 GMT Monday).

The definitive ceasefire brings to an end the group's 52-year-old war against the Colombian state. It follows four years of peace talks in Cuba.

The Farc leader, known as Timochenko, said that the long war against the state was over.

The final peace agreement will be signed in the next few weeks.

• Who are the Farc?
• Inside a Farc camp
• Timeline of the conflict
• Guerrilla leader who talks peace
• The Norwegian who helped broker peace

The two sides had signed a bilateral ceasefire in June, paving the way for a final agreement.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Farc (the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) will give up its armed struggle and join the legal political process.

The longest-running conflict in South America has killed an estimated 260,000 people and displaced millions.

Singapore confirms 41 cases of locally-transmitted Zika virus

A contractor fogs a condominium garden in Singapore in an effort to kill mosquitoes, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Tim Wimborne/File Photo

An Aedes aegypti mosquito is seen inside a test tube as part of a research on preventing the spread of the Zika virus and other mosquito-borne diseases at a control and prevention center in Guadalupe, neighbouring Monterrey, Mexico, March 8, 2016.REUTERS/Daniel Becerril/File Photo

By Marius Zaharia-Sun Aug 28, 2016

Singapore has confirmed 41 cases of locally-transmitted Zika virus, mostly among foreign construction workers, and said it expected more cases to be identified.

All but seven of those infected have fully recovered, the health ministry and the National Environment Agency (NEA) said in a joint statement on Sunday. Those seven remain in hospital.

On Saturday, authorities had confirmed a 47-year-old Malaysian woman living in southeastern Singapore as the city-state's first case of a local transmission of the virus - which in Brazil has been linked to a rare birth defect.

The authorities said they tested 124 people, primarily foreign construction workers employed on a site in the same part of Singapore. That site has been ordered to halt work, and workers' dormitories are being inspected. Seventy-eight people tested negative and five cases were pending. Thirty-four patients had fully recovered.

Four Singaporean men had developed symptoms of the virus in the past week and were hospitalized on Saturday. It was not clear where the foreign workers were from or when their cases were detected. Singapore hosts a large contingent of workers from the Asian sub-continent.

None of those infected had traveled recently to Zika-affected areas. "This confirms that local transmission of Zika virus infection has taken place," the statement said.

The ministry "cannot rule out further community transmission since some of those tested positive also live or work in other parts of Singapore," the statement said. "We expect to identify more positive cases."

Singapore, a major regional financial center and busy transit hub, which maintains a constant vigil against the mosquito-borne dengue virus, reported its first case of the Zika virus in May, brought in by a middle-aged man who had been to Brazil.

CLEAN-UP

Singapore deployed around 200 NEA officers to clean drains and spray insecticide in the mainly residential area early on Sunday to counter mosquito breeding grounds, and volunteers and contractors handed out leaflets and insect repellent.

Zika, carried by some mosquitoes, was detected in Brazil last year and has since spread across the Americas. The virus poses a risk to pregnant women because it can cause severe birth defects. It has been linked in Brazil to more than 1,600 cases of microcephaly - where babies are born with small heads.

All medical services in Singapore had been alerted "to be extra vigilant" and immediately report any Zika-associated symptoms to the health ministry.

Local residents welcomed the NEA clean-up on Sunday.

"I'm very scared of mosquitoes because they always seem to bite me, they never bite my husband," 

Janice, 31, who gave only her first name, told Reuters. "This concerns me because maybe in a couple of years I want to have another (child)."

Singapore said there were "ongoing local transmission" cases in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. Other countries in the region to have detected the Zika virus since 2013 include Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives and the Philippines, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Malaysia said on Sunday it stepped up surveillance at main transit points with Singapore - handing out leaflets on Zika prevention and having paramedics ready to handle visitors with potential symptoms of the virus.

In Thailand, where close to 100 cases of Zika have been recorded across 10 provinces this year, the Department of Disease Control (DDC) was screening athletes returning from the Olympic Games in Brazil, but was not otherwise changing its prevention measures.

"Every country in this region has Zika transmission cases," said Prasert Thongcharoen, an adviser to the DDC. "Thailand has, however, managed to contain the problem through early detection."

A foreign ministry spokesman said Indonesia was "following developments". Oskar Pribadi, a health ministry official, said there had been no recent Zika cases in the country.

Vietnam has to date reported three cases of locally-transmitted Zika infection.

The current strain of Zika sweeping through Latin America and the Caribbean originated in Asia, where people may have built up greater immunity.

The WHO has said there is strong scientific consensus that Zika can also cause Guillain-Barre, a rare neurological syndrome that causes temporary paralysis in adults.

(Reporting by Marius Zaharia, with additional reporting by Aradhana Aravindan in SINGAPORE, A. 

Ananthalakshmi in KUALA LUMPUR, Amy Lefevre in BANGKOK, Agustinus Beo Da Costa in JAKARTA, My Pham in HANOI and Julie Steenhuysen in CHICAGO; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

Is Botox as safe as we think it is?

New research suggests that the popular treatment for wrinkles might not stay put when injected into the body

 A recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has raised fresh doubts about how Botox works in the body. Photograph: Jutta Klee/fStop/Getty/Getty Images/fStop

Alison Moodie-Saturday 27 August 2016

Sales for Botox – the drug that erases wrinkles and treats muscular disorders – reached nearly $2bn last year. The treatment is generally considered safe and doctors use it liberally, in part because of the view that it’s a relatively harmless and temporary solution to ailments real and imagined.

But a recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has raised fresh doubts about how Botox works in the body. Contrary to notions that it stays put at the injection site, researchers found evidence from animal tests that the drug was in fact able to move between nerve cells, raising the possibility that the same kind of migration could be occurring in humans.

This isn’t a new concern. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a safety warning in 2009 that said the toxin “may spread from the area of injection to produce symptoms of botulism”, including muscle weakness and difficulty breathing that can occur hours or weeks after an injection.

Botox is the trade name for Botulinum Toxin Type A, a neurotoxin known for causing botulism, an illness that paralyzes muscles and can be fatal. Botox first got FDA approval to treat medical ailments such as muscle spasms, excessive underarm sweating and eyelid tics.

In 2002, the FDA approved the drug to be used cosmetically to minimize facial wrinkles, primarily the vertical lines between the eyebrows. Botox had been used off-label for cosmetic purposes prior to this.

In 2001, Botox sales were just a little over $300m; last year, sales reached $1.9bn and accounted for nearly half of manufacturer Allergan’s overall revenue.

Botox has a remarkably safe history. Only 36 serious adverse effects associated with cosmetic use were reported to the FDA between 1989 and 2003, according to a 2005 study. And of those, 13 patients had underlying medical conditions that may have explained their response to the drug.

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“Any medication has risks, but the safety record for Botox is actually very robust,” said Hayley Goldbach, a resident physician of dermatology at the University of California-Los Angeles Health. “And consider that there have been tens of millions of patients treated with Botox.”

The Wisconsin study set out to test whether the toxin remains in the injected area, or whether it has the ability to travel. The researchers looked at two strains of botulinum toxin. Using mouse neurons, they showed that the toxin molecules were able to move between different nerve cells in a lab dish.

“Once these toxins enter a neuron, a fraction of the toxin acts within that neuron, but another fraction is able to move – from the first neuron – into connected neurons,” said senior author Edwin Chapman, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor of neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In other words, these toxins do in fact move about among connected networks of neurons.”

What isn’t clear is how far the toxin travels, said Chapman, which could depend on the dose and other factors.

But doctors say they’re still mostly comfortable with Botox procedures. Even if the toxin is able to move between nerve cells, it’s unlikely that it will result in complications far from the injected site, said Kathleen Souzzi, an instructor at the department of dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine. For instance, a person likely won’t experience trouble breathing after being injected with Botox in the face.

“Complications are rare and when they occur typically involve the local spread of the toxin to cause paralysis of unintended targets, for example, eyelid drooping,” she said.

The study tested mice neurons using a test tube, and it’s not clear whether the same results would occur in a living organism like the human body, said Goldbach.

“They didn’t study humans so their findings can’t necessarily be extrapolated beyond the laboratory,” she said. “Also, even if there is some migration, we need to know how far and if it is important or dangerous.”

Chapman concedes that more research is needed to see how the drug interacts with human nerve cells.

“That’s a valid question,” he said. “Now we know for certain that the toxins can move from neuron to neuron, that’s the beginning, not the end.”

For patients with debilitating ailments like chronic migraines, the relief that Botox brings can be life changing. In those cases, the pros may outweigh any risks.

“It’s worth trying for people who are having a hard time living with pain,” said study co-author Ewa Bomba-Warczak, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University Wisconsin-Madison. “Some patients have no other choice.”

There are currently no alternatives to Botox that are as effective. For those who do use it, the effects are temporary, so even if the toxin does travel between cells, it won’t remain in the body forever.

“To make it less scary, all toxins have a limited life,” said Chapman. “For most patients, regardless of how Botox is used, it will eventually be destroyed by the body.”

Sumanthiran explains the certificate of absence

August 25, 2016, 10:15 pm 

TNA Parliamentarian M.A.Sumanthiran told the House yesterday that the certificate of absence was a mere acknowledgment by the government that the person concerned was not around. 

Joining the second reading debate of Registration of Deaths (Temporary Provisions) (Amendment) Bill, MP Sumanthiran said that the certificate of absence did not extinguish the right to have an inquiry into the fate of a missing person.

"This amendment addresses the issue of the family knowing the fate of the missing person. If there is no evidence or if it is ascertainable as to what happened to that person, you still have the certificate of absence, the legal incidents of which will enable you to continue to move forward in life."

MP Sumanthiran said several people had obtained death certificates unwillingly. There was a mechanism in place with regard to the missing persons and a new law had been enacted. Through that amendment, there was an option to accept a certificate of absence instead of a certificate of death. Even those who had obtained death certificates unwillingly could obtain certificates of absence so that investigations could be conducted into the disappearance of the persons concerned.

The Jaffna District MP said several thousands of citizens had died due to violence. It had become necessary to enable the surviving members of the families to get on with their lives to move forward. Therefore the ordinary law had to be amended.

Thousands of complaints had been made to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) by the relatives of people who had been missing during the conflict. More than 90 percent of complaints received by the LLRC related to persons who had gone missing over a period of time, most notably during the last stages of the war.

The LLRC report had brought that out and made various recommendations. Unfortunately, the then government which appointed the LLRC had not thought it appropriate to implement the recommendations of the commission.

Although several actions were taken to persuade the government to implement the LLRC recommendation most of them had gone unimplemented. The UNHRC also called upon the then government to implement the recommendations of its own commission. Some of those important recommendations were related to the case of missing persons, he said.

Thereafter, in order to show the important aspect of the LLRC’s recommendation, the then previous government had appointed a commission headed by former High Court Judge Maxwell Paranagama. The LLRC recommended that an investigative commissioner should be appointed with respect to the missing persons. But, what was done was the appointment of another commission which held sittings all over the country. But, people felt compelled to go before that commission also all over again to make complaints about their relatives who had gone missing.

Those relatives had complained to various institutions such as ICRC, Human Rights office, police stations and they had files full of those documents that they had forwarded to various authorities. They went before the Paranagama commission. But, those hearings were not satisfactory, Sumanthiran said.

The present government, too, continued to extend that commission. "I believe it has now come to an end."

When that commission started its sittings in Killinochchi, close to the place where the commission sat, another tent had been put up and a son of the former president was personally present there doling out cash to people who were going to the Paranagama Commission to divert them to the other shed giving them cash and asking them to apply for death certificates for their loved ones. People had been bribed to accept that the missing persons were dead, the MP said.  (SI)

Will The OMP Address What Is Missing In The Justice System – The Law?

By Basil Fernando –August 26, 2016

Basil Fernando

The law relating to the Office of Missing Persons (OMP) is now part of Sri Lanka’s statute books. That is a good enough reason for all citizens to learn what is involved in an enforced disappearance. Some clarity on the matter may help in making use of this statute in many different ways. Enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka often involve five stages: illegal arrest, illegal detention, torture and other ill treatment, killing and the disposal of the body. There are therefore many illegalities involved at every stage of an enforced disappearance.

Illegality 1: Under the normal law of Sri Lanka, an arrest must be done according to the due process of law. Making any arrest in violation of the due process of law is prohibited by the constitution itself, under Article 13(1). Illegal arrest is also a crime. However, in most instances of enforced disappearance, the perpetrators make a deliberate attempt to secure arrests without following any of the steps required by the due process of law. The rationale is that, if the due process of law is to be followed, the result would be to leave traces of evidence about the arrest as well as those who did the arrest; when we look at how disappearances have been carried out in the past, we see that the officers who came to make arrests did not come in their uniforms. Often they even wore hoods or other disguises to ensure that they would not be identified.

Illegality 2: The law requires that a person who has been arrested should be told the reason for his arrest. This is also a right guaranteed under Article 13(1) of the Constitution: “…Any person arrested shall be informed of the reason for his arrest.” However, when a person is taken in the course of an enforced disappearance, no such reason is given; if the actual reason was to be given, the officers would have to say that the person is being taken for the purpose of making him or her disappear.

Illegality 3: The lawful bases for securing an arrest are “on two grounds only, that is to say, either because the prisoner or person suffering restraint is accused of some offence and must be brought before the Courts to stand his trial, or because he has been duly convicted of some offence and must suffer punishment for it.” (AV Dicey, An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution). The purpose of arresting a person for an enforced disappearance is to make him or her disappear, which, going by the past experiences in Sri Lanka, means to kill someone and to dispose of their body in secret. Thus, the very arrest is illegal as the purpose for which it is done is illegal.

Illegality 4: The law requires that officers engaged in the arrest of a person should keep notes of every event relating to the arrest in as minute detail as possible. The purpose of such a provision is to protect the arresting officers in the case of any inquiry into a complaint by demonstrating that the officers have acted in the proper manner under the given circumstances as revealed by the notes taken by them at the time of the arrest. When a person is being arrested for the purpose of causing an enforced disappearance, the relevant officers are exempted from maintaining any records about the arrest. In fact, keeping any records may amount to an admission of the arrest. By such admission the officers become answerable for the subsequent disappearance. The purpose of not keeping any records is a precautionary measure to avoid liability by denying the arrest itself. Thus the officers who engage in such activities are aware that they will be under an obligation to deny the very acts that they are now engaged in. In this manner these officers get entrapped in a pit of deception and thus behave very much like criminals, who also take precautions so as to be able to deny that they engage in any act connected to any crime that they may be charged with.

Illegality 5: Under the law, arrested persons can only be detained in places that are authorised to be used for detention. Such places of detention are gazetted and known to the public. Keeping a person in detention in a place which is not thus authorised is illegal. However, in the case of arrests made for the purpose of causing an enforced disappearance, they are not usually kept in authorised places of detention. Even when they are taken to an authorised place of detention, they will be kept there secretly and they will not be registered in the usual forms on which all the names of persons who are detained are supposed to be recorded. Thus, again, the officers who engage in such activities are well aware that they are detaining the person in an illegal manner and in an illegal place.

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Cheers in Colombo, apathy in Jaffna

Sunday, August 28, 2016

The contradiction was clear if not absurd. Even at the very moment in time that I was being sent unsolicited messages by Colombo’s non-governmental ‘twitterati’ delighting in self-congratulatory chest-thumping over the turbulent passing of the Office of Missing Persons (OMP) Bill, that euphoria was distinctly missing in the Northern peninsula, among the very people for whom this piece of legislation was (primarily) intended.

Failure to draw in core constituencies of victims

Let us be clear about this. The fate of the South’s ‘disappeared’ during the state brutalities of the eighties had not been the motivating factor for this Government’s headlong rush into ‘solutions’ despite the colorful intertwining of state excesses against the Sinhalese during the eighties to justify the effort. Rather, it was the plight of the ‘disappeared’ in the North and the East which was the central international pressure point necessitating this mad scramble by the coalition Government and its allies, including the North’s Tamil National Alliance (TNA).

Logically therefore, the constituencies left to struggle in the face of continuing state surveillance and apathy in the former war theatre should have been directly drawn into Sri Lanka’s much trumpeted exercise of ‘transitional justice.’ But that is not the case, if we leave aside the familiar spectacle of the North’s political representatives claiming to ‘speak for the people.’ And the anger thereof is searing.

So as the cheers resounded in Colombo’s glitzy lounges, it was a different story in Jaffna with fury counter balanced by disinterest if not apathy. ‘What will this body give us?’ questioned two agitated mothers whose struggle for their ‘disappeared’ children involved traipsing despairingly from one governmental agency to another. One mother brandished a newspaper article with a photograph of a line of hopeless faces along the security perimeter of an army camp post 2009 and wailed ‘that is my child but when I go to that camp and ask where she is, they only tell me that she was never there.’ ‘Will this Office give me answers for what happened to my child and will it give me justice when I am asked to go before it and cry all over again?’ she persisted.

Truth vis a vis Justice

There is a vexed interplay between finding the ‘truth and securing ‘justice.’ This is what the convenient ‘pigeon-holing’ of separate ‘solutions’ (without the affected communities being informed of the connections between each element) into inter alia, an OMP, another of Sri Lanka’s interminable Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and a Special Court ignores. And the refusal to address the issue of flawed justice institutions and pervasive systemic impunity further bedevils the legitimacy of Sri Lanka’s transitional justice package.

Adding to the confusion is the sudden springing up of ‘transitional justice experts’, (more or less like instant noodles), half of whose experience in academia or the solid practice of the law in the national courts can be summed up on the back of the proverbial envelope while the other half is conspicuously distinguished by their lack of a popular support base either in the North or the South. Thus, a distastefully elitist mentality predominates which treats the very idea of ‘peoples’ participation’ with disdain preferring instead to maintain a façade of handpicked and targeted ‘consultations’ with carefully ‘packed’ questions that have the suggested ‘correct’ answers on what ‘the victims want.’

This Colombo ‘bubble’ as it were is also characterized by a disturbingly fluid ability of many to be part of numerous ‘government’ committees and task forces while professing to be ‘non-governmental’ at the same time. Hence we have anti-corruption activists defending the slow pace of corruption cases and human rights activists seeking to justify the failure to engage in substantive security sector reform. Truly this grotesque paradox can only be possible in Sri Lanka.

The law ‘being lost in translation’

To be brutally frank, despite the sentimental reminders that I find myself awash in with regard to South Africa’s transitional justice experience, I would be hard put to find a more obvious contrast. The South African process was led by towering personalities in law, in civil rights, in religion and in social justice who hailed not from the secluded corners of ‘white’ privilege but were instead firmly situated among the South African dispossessed and who counted as honourable, the time spent in prison as punishment for that commitment. Their knowledge of constitutional law was profound. This was in fact, a major reason why their efforts stood up to rigorous scrutiny by the courts and formed a formidable body of jurisprudence which civil rights activists used extensively.

In Sri Lanka however, the law appears to have been ‘lost in translation.’ Indeed, this is evidenced beyond the transitional justice sphere where legal challenges come from multiple fronts ranging from the procedural (VAT Bill) to confusion in regard to constitutional concepts (proposal that the 2006 contested Singarasa judgment of the Supreme Court may be ‘over-ruled’ by the Speaker).

Reportedly there has also been a simply bizarre proposal that amendments may be entered into the OMP law after the Bill has passed the seal of Parliament and the certification of the Speaker. Meanwhile the much touted asset recovery of criminals of the former regime splutter in legal confusion, only partly owing to loyalists of the former regime. The whole is characterized by what can only be referred to as the phenomenon of great incoherence in government.

Acknowledging the irony

So those of us who throw up our hands in mortified dismay certainly have some justification. What if time was reversed and the Rajapaksa regime was in place? Would there not have been severe remonstrations in regard to the abuse of due process? The singular hypocrisy thereof is stark. And the unnerving consequences of such disarray need no elucidation. Already, the judiciary is being reminded by the Parliament of its place in the constitutional scheme of things.

But for now, it is ironic that those throwing themselves into Colombo’s (well funded) ‘transitional justice’ fray look down their noses when called to account if a greater participatory model should not have been used when addressing the grief of Sri Lanka’s ‘disappeared.’ The sight of a ‘consultation task force’ issuing an interim report on suggestions made by affected communities in regard to the OMP Bill even as the Bill was passed during those very same days is just one of the many perplexingly obvious examples of that irony. tainly there are many more.

Our Missing Countrymen

August 30 – the International Day of the Disappeared and the Office on Missing Persons

by Rajan Philips

( August 28, 2016, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) While the government has been equally commended and condemned for insistently passing the Office on Missing Persons Bill and signing it into law, it is also necessary to point out that the government has not done a commendable job in either making a strong case for, or providing effective answers to criticisms of, the new law. Instead, it has relied more on its numbers and procedural tactics in parliament than in the art of persuasion both inside and outside the legislature. This is unfortunate because more than a reasonably persuasive case could have been made in support of establishing an Office to deal with Sri Lanka’s missing and the disappeared. Honest explanations and broader acceptance are necessary for a successful implementation of the new initiative.

Equally important is the appreciation that enforced disappearances and missing persons are now a global phenomenon even as it is a national burden in many countries, especially those involving post-conflict situations. According to Amnesty International, these practices have become prevalent over the last several decades and “in every region of the world, from Syria to Mexico, and from Gambia to Sri Lanka.” In 2008, August 30 was created as the International Day of the Disappeared to draw attention to the plight of the disappeared and the missing, languishing in secret jails or just unaccountable by any government official to their families or legal representatives. The institution of the Office of Missing persons is being promoted to fill that void and provide a forum for the families of the missing to get at least a hearing.

Not that full information and efforts at persuasion would satisfy the Joint Opposition forces,whowould rather see every bill passed by this government reversed and rejected by the Supreme Court. The very limited purpose, for which the practice of judicial preview of legislation by a special Constitutional Court was first introduced in 1972, and inappropriately brought under the purview of the Supreme Court in 1978, is now being blown out of proportion by the absurd expectations of some that is tantamount to requiringevery government bill to pass muster in the Supreme Court before parliament could vote on it.

Suddenly, the Supreme Court is being called upon to be the ultimate protector of the country’s sovereignty. In common understanding, the role of the judiciary is to protect the rights of citizens against infringement by the executive or the legislature, and not to tell the other two branches of government how to do their job. Sri Lanka has had its bouts with parliamentary tyranny and presidential tyranny, and fatigued pundits now seem to be expecting the judiciary to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s to overcome parliamentary incompetence. This remedy would be worse than the disease. The real answer is to have competent parliamentarians, a consultative president, and an independent judiciary to interpret the law and protect the citizens from unlawful acts.

From Habeas Corpus to Office onMissing Persons

Habeas corpus, the so called Great Writ, represents the long legal tradition in which courts performed the role of protecting people from unlawful arrest. Often traced to Magna Carta proclaimed eight hundred and one years ago in Runnymede, England, habeas corpus has been used to protect subjects from kings and,in modern democracies,to protect citizens from presidents and governments. But governments have found ways of circumventing the application of the Great Writ, first by defining circumstances in which the writ can be suspended, and more recently by using hired agents to make people ‘disappear’ and go missing.

Constitutional limitations and the use of ‘Emergency Powers’ have become common ways of suspending the application of habeas corpus in almost in all democratic countries. After 9-11, Bush Administration’s efforts to deny habeas corpus rights to ‘alien’ detainees in Guantanamo Bay in southeastern Cuba were rejected by the US Supreme Court. The US Constitution has among the most stringent conditions for limiting habeas corpus application, but President Bush’s Attorney General curiously and unpersuasively argued that the American constitution does not grant the right to habeas corpus but only protection against it being taken way. “How can you protect something that is not granted?” he was asked. Later, President Obama went so far as to (re)confirm by executive order – the right to habeas corpus to all detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

In ‘lesser’ democratic countries, often under military hegemony with compliant judiciary, the practice of causing enforced disappearances and creating ‘missing people’ has effectively scuppered the application of habeas corpus. Oftentimes, the motivation behind enforced disappearance is to silence a government’s critics and to instil fear into targeted groups. But the definition of disappeared or missing persons goes far wider, to include all those whose families have lost contact with as a result of war, conflicts, natural disasters or other tragedies. In situations of war and conflicts, the perpetrators of disappearance include both state and non-state political or criminal actors, often in equal measure.

Habeas corpus may not provide the same redress to those apprehended by non-state actors, even though the apprehension is always unlawful regardless of whether it is open or secret. But in a ‘private’ kidnapping case in Bihar, the Indian Supreme Court issued habeas corpus notice on the Central and Bihar governments on the ground that the central and state police have not taken sufficient action to rescue the victim. The victim was an 11 year old girl and was kidnapped (and later killed as it turned out) over a land dispute, and the court action was initiated by New Delhi Law Faculty students alleging that the police were being deliberately negligent and therefore complicit.

While there may or may not be any parallel between old Writ of Habeas Corpus and the new Office on Missing Persons from a strictly legal standpoint, it is possible to see similarities between the two from historical and human rights standpoints. Just as the old writ was initiated to offerredress from unlawful detention, the new Office is intended to provide assistance in investigating the fate of involuntarily missing people. Whereas habeas corpus may not have been effective against non-state actors unlawfully detaining people, the Office of Missing Persons can search for any and all missing persons regardless of who caused their disappearance and in what circumstances. The scope of the Office could include even those who go missing after a natural disaster.An important similarity is that the primary emphasis is on rescuing the victims from, or getting information about, unlawful arrest, detention or enforced disappearance, and not on punishing the perpetrators.

The Sri Lankan Situation

From the beginning of British rule in the island, the judiciary began the tradition of standing up to the colonial executive and offering occasional protection to ordinary Sri Lankans. The highwatermark for the writ of habeas corpus came at the tail end of colonial rule, in the celebrated Bracegirdle case. Sri Lankan governments after independence took quite easily to the mechanism of emergency rule to quell working class agitation, civil disturbances or political unrest. Even before independence, in 1947, the first UNP government enacted the Public Security Ordinance as a response to the General Strike of that year. Emergency rule under this ordinance became more the rule than exception in subsequent decades. The JVP’s April 1971 insurrection gave the pretext for emergency rule that lasted for six years until the change of government in 1977. JR Jayewardene, the newly elected Prime Minister-turned-President, vowed never to declare emergency again but placed Jaffna under emergency rule in 1979 “to eliminate the menace of terrorism in all its forms.”

The rise of the JVP and the LTTE within a decade ushered in the era of enforced disappearances and missing persons. They also brought the judiciary into a more compliant mode with the executive branch of the state. The judiciary that was somewhat truculent during the trial of the high ranking military coup suspects, in 1962, was more accommodative in the trial of the JVP suspects by the specially created Criminal Justice Commission (CJC). According to Lionel Bopage, the 1971 CJC exercise was the start of the erosion of judicial independence. The slippery slope got steeper with the arrival of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and other measures.Everything went from bad to worse with the second coming of the JVP in 1987-88, the IPKF intervention, and the protracted war between Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE.

Sri Lanka has a backlog of not only missing persons but also institutions that are either broken down or missing in action. And the government can claim a moral brief to put things right, but whether it has sufficient credibility to take on this task and whether it is doing it in the most appropriate ways are open questions. The government’s Foreign Minister was not only the lead but the only government speaker in parliament during the debate on the OMP bill. In fairness, he laid out a reasonable case for the initiative, but it was more formalistic than inspirational. And who was his intended audience – people in Sri Lanka, or his counterparts in Geneva? Considering the questions that have been raised, why did not the Minister of Justice speak to these matters in parliament?

In its eagerness to out-fox the Joint Opposition, the government may have shot itself in the foot by rushing in the vote amidst confusion over which amendments were in and which were not. The Prime Minister has now assured that the new Act will be amended to included changes proposed by the JVP and not included in the passage of the bill, even though the JVP was supportive of the bill and was proposing friendly amendments. This is hardly the way to demonstrate parliamentary competence. The Prime Minister later found time to address Law College students on the OMP, but his voice was missing in action during the debate in parliament.

From a human rights standpoint, itought to be extraordinary when a country’s parliament that passed the Public Security Ordinance in 1947 (the old LSSP then vowed to repeal it, perhaps after ‘permanent revolution’) and more draconian pieces in later years, should now pass a legislation that would enable the investigation of all state and non-state actions involving enforced disappearances and missing persons over the last 45 years. But what is extraordinary is that the government that has passed this new legislation is unable to genuinely celebrate it or claim kudos for it. The rub, if not the real elephant, is in the government’s inability to argue its case in the country at large, and more particularly among the Sinhalese. There is only one advocate in its ranks with some hope of successfully advocating this case and that, in my view, is President Sirisena. And he is not saying much.

UN CERD: CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS ON SRI LANKA

(Anastasia Crickley, Vice President CERD)

26/08/2016

Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Concluding observations on the tenth to seventeenth periodic reports of Sri Lanka*
1. The Committee considered the combined tenth to seventeenth periodic reports of Sri Lanka (CERD/C/LKA/10-17), submitted in one document, at its 2468th and 2469th meetings (CERD/C/SR. 2468, CERD/C/SR. 2469), held on 15 and 16 August 2016. At its 2482nd meeting, held on 24 August 2016, it adopted the following concluding observations.

A. Introduction

Cerd_c_lka_co_10!17!24983_e-1.PDF-un Cerd Concluding Observations on Sri Lanka by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

IMADR Wants Government To Take Immediate Action To Combat Racial Discrimination By Implementing UN Recommendations

August 27, 2016

The International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) has urged the Sri Lankan Government to fully implement the recommendations from the UN human rights body to combat racial discrimination, while emphasizing that lasting peace and human rights in Sri Lanka cannot be achieved without addressing the causes for the ethnic and religious polarisation which affected inter-religious and inter-ethnic harmony in the country.

Dr. Nimalka Fernando – IMADR President

In a statement, IMADR said, “We urge the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) to fully implement the recommendations from the UN human rights body to combat racial discrimination. On 15th and 16th August, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) met the Government delegation to assess its efforts to eradicate discrimination in line with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). It was 15 years after the last examination which took place during the time Sri Lanka was facing the protracted armed conflict. Today, for the first time after the conclusion of the armed conflict, the CERD issued a series of recommendations to the GoSL that would assist in the compliance with treaty obligations in its fight against racism.”

With the Asia Committee, International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) submitted a report to the CERD to provide alternative information on racial discrimination in Sri Lanka with a focus on the conditions faced by the Tamil population in the plantation regions, minority communities and the rise of religious extremism.

The recommendations from the CERD cover a variety of issues in Sri Lanka, namely: Statistics;

Definition of racial discrimination; Domestic application of the Convention and complaints; National Human Rights Institution; Prevention of Terrorism Act; Hate speech and hate crimes; Freedom of religion of ethnic and ethno-religious minorities; Tamils of Indian origin or “Plantation Tamils”; Situation of the Adivasi/Veddah people; Situation of internally displaced persons; Situation of minority women in war affected areas; and Truth and reconciliation[3].

The CERD Country Rapporteur for Sri Lanka, Mr. Jose Francisco Cali Tzay, stressed in his concluding remarks at the dialogue with the Government, “We very much congratulate the country for the commitment to peace in the country. And that’s why we would urge you to pay attention to the situation of racial discrimination. Various bodies confirm that this underlied the armed conflict in Sri Lanka.”

“I recall the historic moment when the Citizenship Act was adopted following the previous recommendations in the year 2001. Similarly the recommendations of the CERD have to be linked to the overall efforts of reconciliation. The challenge now is to incorporate the recommendations into the on-going Constitutional reform process, thereby demonstrating the political will of the Government to uphold human rights of all, affirming non-discrimination, pluralism and equality.” says Dr. Nimalka Fernando, Co-Chairperson of IMADR and a human rights defender from Sri Lanka.

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A way out of the ethnic imbroglio

Iseem to have been under-estimating the US factor in our ethnic problem, seeing the US as not much more than an auxiliary of India. Probably the US will give primacy of place to India over our ethnic problem if India insists, but otherwise it would want also to play its own independent role, strutting about and kicking people about in its avatar of sole super- power.

by Izeth Hussain

( August 27, 2016, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) For several weeks the emphasis in regard to the ethnic problem has been placed on the setting up of four institutions beginning with the one to deal with missing persons. All four have to do with the past, not with the future. But for long it has been axiomatic that our future requires as an essential imperative the finding of a political solution for the ethnic problem. Strangely, nothing is heard about that these days. The situation seems to be identical with what prevailed under the last Government from 2009 to 2015 when the question of a political solution was in practice put into abeyance. The probable reason for the present government adopting the same strategy is identical: the difficulty, may be the practical impossibility, of finding a political solution on the basis of 13 A.

                             Therefore to find a way out of the imbroglio we have to go outside the framework of 13 A. For this purpose we should first take count of what seem to be the fundamentals of the ethnic problem. The fact that we have had a quarter century of war at a cost of a hundred thousand dead might suggest that what we have on our hands is a deeply intractable problem. In a recent article on the Partition of India I have suggested in the brief concluding paragraph that the war was a contingent development, not the inexorable working out of historic forces – not of irreconcilable Sinhalese-Tamil hostility and so on. The war was set off by the State terrorism of the period 1977 to 1983, which was most certainly not inevitable. We must bear in mind a fact of supreme importance: there were no ethnic riots from 1958 to 1977, not even one, but just three weeks after President JR assumed power riots took place with one hundred to three hundred Tamils being killed. The State terrorism was the consequence of the fact that JR was a man of blood, in Eric Fromm’s terms a death-driven necrophiliac. The war was therefore the result of the contingent and the fortuitous, not of inexorable historic forces. We can now look forward to establishing the political solution that was available to us in 1977.

                             I believe that the foreign presence in our ethnic problem has been far too intrusive. The Indian presence in it has been legitimate: the fall-out in Tamil Nadu of what is done to Tamils here is of legitimate concern to Delhi. But Rajiv Gandhi’s intervention of 1987 though well meant went horribly wrong. It is worth reiterating – even endlessly reiterating – that there was no imperialist intent behind that intervention: otherwise we cannot explain the withdrawal of Indian troops with nothing, absolutely nothing, to show for the 1,200 IPKF men who were killed here. All the same, I believe that the Tamil Nadu/Delhi factor is proving to be harmful to our Tamils. They know that if not for that factor there will be no Tamil ethnic problem in Sri Lanka today, but they seem to be giving it excessive importance. That factor certainly means that there will be no further necrophiliac pogrom as in 1983: we can be sure that there will be quick Indian intervention, with solid international backing, to stop it. That does not however mean that India will back our Tamils in any and every one of their demands. I believe that India couldl come to recognize that devolution on an ethnic basis will be the worst fate that can befall this unfortunate country. It could come to recognize alternatives that are just and feasible.

                             I seem to have been under-estimating the US factor in our ethnic problem, seeing the US as not much more than an auxiliary of India. Probably the US will give primacy of place to India over our ethnic problem if India insists, but otherwise it would want also to play its own independent role, strutting about and kicking people about in its avatar of sole super- power. India however is in desperate need of the US as an ally to contain China, its historic ally Russia being too preoccupied with its near abroad and the Middle East to have much time for South Asia: India has therefore to allow some leeway for the US in Sri Lanka. An important point is that we are today witnessing the American Empire in its decrepitude. Chalmers Johnson in his The Sorrows of Empire points out that the Americans are today the practitioners of a new form of empire, an empire of bases. I believe that the reason for this is that though the US has the power to blow up the globe several times over it doesn’t have the power to dominate the peoples of the globe, and therefore it has to satisfy itself with a so-called empire of bases. Also relevant for the purposes of this article is the observation of Emmanuel Todd in his After Empire that since the American Empire in its decrepitude cannot take on the big powers it harasses negligible powers like Iraq and Iran pretending that they pose grave threats to the rest of the world. As part of the same strategy the US has fostered the myth of universal terrorism, according to which it led the world’s counter-attack against terrorism in as many as sixty countries. The UNHRC Resolution of last year, behind which the main driving force was the US, might also be explained in terms of the syndrome I am outlining here: Sri Lanka a small powerless country is being harassed. That Resolution promotes a spirit of vengefulness, not of reconciliation, and instead of meliorating the ethnic problem it serves to aggravate it. But it projects the image of the US as a mighty super power that has the power to intervene here, there, and everywhere to build a better world. I think it is time for our Indian friends to tell our American friends to lay off Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem for a while.

                             I have never had the slightest doubt that Norway was impelled by nothing but the noblest motives in playing a leading role in the peace process. An incapacity for gratitude where gratitude is due does not speak well for the moral quality of a nation. We will do well to bear in mind that Norway retained the explicit and total confidence of India and all the others involved in the peace process right to the end. But, except for India, they were tragically mistaken about the LTTE. Arguably they helped prolong the war by fostering the myth of the military invincibility of the LTTE, and failed to understand that the LTTE was never sincere about reaching a political solution – something that was well grasped by India, which significantly did not want to be a Co-Chair.

                             On the whole therefore foreign helpfulness over our ethnic problem has not helped but hindered. It is time for foreigners to stop breathing down our necks all the time and allow us to find our own equilibrium where their helpfulness has too often promoted disequilibrium. It is time for India to tell our Tamils to stew for a while – I won’t be surprised if that indeed is India’s present strategy because we don’t hear anything about our Government being pressured to get going towards a political solution. The way out of the ethnic imbroglio cannot be through devolution on an ethnic basis, as I have argued earlier. The best option would be through a fully functioning democracy together with safeguards against discrimination towards the minorities as in the West. But there is also another option to be considered.

                             One of my Tamil readers has pointed out that one of the attractions of 13 A is that it enables the appointment of Tamils to the administrative structure in the North and East. If 13 A has to be jettisoned, an alternative might be a system of proportional representation in the State sector: thirty per cent or whatever to be reserved for minorities in the Cabinet, Parliament, the Judiciary, the Administration, the Police Force, the Armed Forces, and the entire gamut of the state sector. I believe that something like a system of proportional representation was tried out in Lebanon, and it did provide a high degree of ethnic stability for several decades. I don’t know whether that will be feasible in Sri Lanka, but some objections spring to mind. At present the minorities are heavily under-represented in the State and the system proposed might amount to what has been called “positive discrimination” and “affirmative action”, which in the US and India has proved to be more harmful than beneficial in the long run. I don’t know whether that and similar objections would apply to what my Tamil reader has in mind.

                             However my basic objection to his proposal is that it places a heavy emphasis on ethnic identities. Both the Sinhalese and the Tamils are intensely racist people – as I have found to my cost – for which reason I cannot believe that any political system based on ethnic identity is going to work smoothly here. It is more likely to aggravate the problem. But we did show a capacity to transcend our identities when several decades ago we had a smoothly functioning democracy and a relatively high degree of ethnic harmony. In the changed context of today we need to bolster a fully functioning democracy with safeguards for minority interests as in the West. I don’t see any reason why that model should not succeed here as well, provided we are in earnest about it. A probable desideratum for that success is that foreigners should leave us alone for some time.