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Setback for Rajapaksa

COLOMBO: The Mahinda Rajapaksa government suffered a set back on Wednesday night after Sri Lanka failed to get re-elected to the United Nations’s Human Rights Council following a campaign by human rights groups.

According to reports reaching here, Japan, Bahrain, South Korea and Pakistan beat Sri Lanka and East Timor to the four places in the Asia group of the 47-member body at the election held in New York.

The Government was hopeful of re-entering the Council after the recent successful conduct of the election to the Eastern Provincial Council (EPC) and vigorous lobbying with member nations of the U.N. for a vote in its favour. India had also favoured its re-election.

A day before the election, the ‘International Coalition of NGOs’ in a statement appealed to the U.N. members not to vote for Sri Lanka.

“While we welcome the attention that the Government of Sri Lanka has given to the concerns of the international human rights community, it is important to note that in its response of May 9 to our letter, of May 6, the Sri Lankan government does not contest allegations that it has committed hundreds of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in its conflict with secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [LTTE]. As we have noted previously, the LTTE’s long and horrific record of atrocities does not justify the government’s own rampant abuses,” the statement made on May 20 said.

The Coalition said that although these abuses have gone on for many years, the Sri Lankan government cited measures it had yet to take to protect witnesses against human rights abuse and an “action plan” on human rights it had yet to undertake.

It noted that it allowed U.N. human right experts and agencies to visit, but did not deny that it impeded their investigations and failed to implement their principal recommendations, including repeated ones to allow international human rights monitoring under U.N. auspices.

“Most strikingly, the government’s five-page response entirely fails to deny that in the two years since it was first elected to the Human Rights Council, its security forces have been directly implicated in hundreds of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings, including of humanitarian workers; arbitrary arrests and long-term detentions without charge or trial; and widespread torture of detainees. A government responsible for such gross and systematic abuse is clearly not “upholding the highest standards of human rights” as is required of Human Rights Council members,” the Coalition said.

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