Sri Lanka should end the indefinite detention of some of the 11,000 people held in its custody for suspected links with the Tamil Tiger rebels, a leading rights group said yesterday.
New-York based Human Rights Watch said that the government must identify which detainees with suspected rebel links present a genuine threat and release the rest. Sri Lanka’s human rights minister said he had not seen the report, and would respond to it later.
The suspects were detained during and after the Sri Lankan military’s final offensive against the Tamil rebels, which ended with the rebel group’s defeat in May and brought to a close decades of civil war.
“The government has denied detainees the right to be informed of specific reasons for their arrest, to challenge the lawfulness of the detention before an independent judicial authority, and to have access to legal counsel and family members,” the group said in a summary of its report.
At the end of the war more than a quarter million Tamils were placed into government-run camps to be screened for rebel ties as their home villages were cleared of mines.
Some 100,000 civilians still live in those camps. Those with suspected Tiger ties are held in separate facilities the government calls “rehabilitation centers.”
“While the government contends that many of those being held have surrendered to rehabilitation voluntarily, the lack of access to the detainees by humanitarian agencies and other independent monitors makes it difficult to know how many surrendered, how many of this group did so voluntarily, and how many were arrested,” the report said.
Human Rights Watch said the current treatment of rebel suspects violates international humanitarian law, which regulates the rights of those detained during conflicts.
The group said it was concerned by the “the lack of transparency in the process and of information about the fate and whereabouts of some of the detainees.”
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