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Rights monitors urgently needed in Sri Lanka: UN

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Monday for international monitors for Sri Lanka.

The call came after the bodies of 11 Muslim men were found hacked to death in the country's east.

The Sri Lankan government and ethnic rebels have traded blame for the massacre.

"There is an urgent need for the international community to monitor the unfolding human rights situation," the commissioner, Louise Arbour, said at the opening session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

"These are not merely cease-fire violations, but grave breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law," she said.

A team of unarmed monitors from Nordic countries is currently operating in Sri Lanka.

Their job is to investigate violations of the 2002 ceasefire accord between the government and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

But the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, as it is called, has no mandate to look into human rights violations of the type that have been seen in recent weeks, meaning that such crimes and victims' claims are not being properly investigated.

In the latest phase of its ethnic conflict -- now more than 20 years old -- Sri Lanka has witnessed a re-emergence of some of its most frightening ghosts: a list which includes disappearances, abductions and killings by unidentified gunmen.

Nearly 2,000 people -- a majority of them civilians -- have been killed since the beginning of the year, according to the Nordic monitoring team.

On Monday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch called on the UN Human Rights Council to dispatch "a mission of inquiry into recent massacres and other atrocities."

The rights group also urged the Sri Lankan government to accept the deployment of a UN human rights monitoring mission to areas of conflict.

The killing of 17 aid workers in eastern Sri Lanka last month drew attention to the dangers facing aid agencies in the country.

Arbour said that "restrictions on humanitarian access have been imposed by both sides," which has complicated things for the Sri Lankan civilians who have found themselves trapped during the fighting.
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