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RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Consider Sanctions Says Parliamentarian

Amantha Perera

COLOMBO, Sep 20 2007 (IPS) - As the nationalist government of President Mahinda Rajpakse continues to resist calls for a United Nations rights monitoring mission in Sri Lanka an elected Tamil leader said the time may have come to consider international sanctions.

”We have at least seven local bodies or committees set up to improve the rights situation here, including the National Human Rights Commission, a new presidential commission and now a committee made up of ministers, but we have not got anywhere,” Mano Ganeshan, an opposition member of parliament, who is also the convener of the Civil Monitoring Committee, told IPS.

“On our own we cannot influence the government to take action (to contain human rights violations), but with international pressure, it will have to act… if this trend continues, sanctions should be considered,” Ganeshan said.

Attempts to find a military solution to the long-festering ethnic conflict on this island nation have resulted in the Rajapakse government coming under increasing pressure to accept a U.N. monitoring mission of the type functioning in Nepal under the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Support for a U.N. mission has been increasing in the last ten months with rights observers saying that there is a culture of impunity prevalent in the country and that the government was showing unwillingness to stop violations.

Also, over the past two weeks, the government has had to face an avalanche of criticism at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva over alleged rights violations.

So far, the government has said that it would not go beyond cooperating with the U.N. in increasing the capacities of local monitoring mechanisms. It has instead extended invitations to several top U.N. officials, including Human Rights commissioner Louise Arbour, to visit the country in the second week of October. But rights watchers say that such visits are a case of too little too late.

The Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) became the latest rights group to appeal to the U.N. Human Rights Council for immediate intervention. It said that in August alone 50 persons were killed and 38 disappeared.

“Given the unwillingness and inability by the Sri Lankan government to guarantee the right to life and justice to the victims of killing and enforced disappearance, the AHRC urges the U.N. Human Rights Council to intervene with urgency directly,” it said in an appeal to the Council this week.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based watchdog said last month that between January 2006 and June over 1,100 abductions have been reported.

HRW, which recently released a report on Sri Lanka ‘Return to War – Human Rights under Siege’, has called for a tough stance on the government. It said that though abductions and other violations had slowed down in the capital Colombo, since the release of its report in July, the situation in the north and east where ethnic Tamils are concentrated has not shown any improvement.

According to HRW, in the first three weeks of August, 21 cases of disappearances and 18 killings had been reported from the northern Jaffna peninsula. HRW echoed sentiments expressed by other activists that the government was either unwilling or incapable of stemming the tide.

Calls for monitors were repeated at an event ‘Human Rights Situation in Sri Lanka’ organised by HRW and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) at Palais des Nations in Geneva on Monday, according to reports made available here by the two organisations.

“Sri Lanka suffers from a long-standing climate of impunity. The Sri Lankan government has failed to hold perpetrators accountable for abuses. Key parts of the criminal justice system, such as the police and the attorney general’s office, have not effectively investigated human rights violations or brought perpetrators to justice. The high level of violence has created an atmosphere of fear and insecurity for civilians,” HRW researcher Charu Lata Hogg told EU parliament.

“Sri Lanka has been maintaining a policy of open and constructive engagement with all U.N. human rights mechanisms and working closely on the ground with U.N. and other agencies from both civil society and the international community in implementing these initiatives, and this totally negates the adverse, unsubstantiated allegations and propaganda of some INGOs and NGOs at these sessions, that lead to their conclusion that Sri Lanka is facing a human rights crisis that calls for U.N. monitoring,’’ Shirani Goonatilleke, director with the Sri Lankan permanent mission in Geneva said at the event, speaking from the floor.

The EU has come out in support of sending international monitors to Sri Lanka. Fransisco Xavier, the representative from Portugal, speaking on behalf of the EU ‘’strongly encouraged’’ the government of Sri Lanka to ‘’agree to the establishment of an OHCHR field presence in Sri Lanka.’’

This is despite the Rajapakse government mounting a high-powered campaign to stall any support at the U.N. Human Rights Council for the setting up of a monitoring office. A week before the sessions got underway, human rights and disaster management minister Mahinda Samarasinghe led a delegation to Geneva to brief Council members on the situation in the country.

“Sri Lanka is open to reasonable persuasion, and nothing is off the table. Sri Lanka is not open to pressure,” Sri Lanka’s permanent representative to the U.N. in Geneva Dayan Jayatilleke told the sessions. He also hinted that the government might take a tougher stance if pressure persists. “We must guard against anything that could disturb this atmosphere of cooperation that could derail this policy of constructive engagement.”

The government has also handed over an aide memoire to the EU in Colombo. “There is no rationale for the EU to initiate any action on Sri Lanka within the context of the Human Rights Council, at this stage. Such action will go against the letter and spirit in which Sri Lanka has been cooperating with U.N. human rights mechanisms,” it said.

Along with U.N Human Rights Commissioner Arbour, other officials including Manfred Nowak, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Walter Kaelin, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General on the human rights of the internally displaced persons will be in the country in the next three months.

Local activists say that only international pressure and the establishment of a U.N. backed monitoring mechanism can improve the situation. International scrutiny, they say, will at least keep the focus on rights violations.