The UN chief announced on Tuesday he had appointed a three-member panel headed by a former Indonesian attorney general to look into alleged rights abuses committed during Sri Lanka’s quarter-century civil war.
The panel is to be chaired by Marzuki Darusman, also the UN’s special rights investigator to North Korea, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s office said.
Its job is to advise Ban on alleged violations of international rights and humanitarian laws during the war’s final stages. The panel aims to get cooperation from Sri Lankan officials and to complete its advisory work within four months.
The other two members are Yasmin Sooka, a former member of a South African commission that investigated apartheid atrocities, and Steven Ratner, a US lawyer and author of a book on the struggle among nations to hold people accountable for human rights abuses.
Specifically, Ban said he is looking to the panel for an assessment of how well Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has followed up on the commitment he made to human rights accountability when Ban visited in May last year.
A statement from the secretary-general said he “remains convinced that accountability is an essential foundation for durable peace and reconciliation in Sri Lanka.”
Human rights groups say the government is illegally detaining the war refugees who comprise the country’s minority Tamil population.
Aid groups say the camps are prone to disease, and they fear that monsoon rains expected in November-December will create a public health crisis.
“We think the expert panel will be valuable only if it will be able to produce a roadmap for an international investigation, and the SG acts on that,” said Peggy Hicks, global advocacy director for Human Rights Watch in New York. “The membership looks good, but experience to date shows the Sri Lanka government is not going to investigate wartime abuses.”
Sri Lanka has rejected either an international or joint investigation, saying civil war is a domestic issue.
Last week, UN Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs B. Lynn Pascoe visited areas close to where the last battles were waged and talked to the people who fled their homes during the fighting and are now being resettled.
The villagers were some of the 300,000 held in camps in the country’s north for months following the government’s defeat of Tamil Tigers rebels last year and the end of 25 years of civil war.
The government says the majority have been released and resettled in their villages, but UN officials estimate about 60,000 to 70,000 remain.
Pascoe called on Rajapaksa to integrate the remainder of those displaced by the civil war with the Tamil Tiger rebels, who fought for a separate homeland while claiming decades of discrimination by the Sinhalese majority.
DIALOGUE: US president-elect Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform confirmed that he had spoken with Xi, saying ‘the call was a very good one’ for the US and China US president-elect Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) discussed Taiwan, trade, fentanyl and TikTok in a phone call on Friday, just days before Trump heads back to the White House with vows to impose tariffs and other measures on the US’ biggest rival. Despite that, Xi congratulated Trump on his second term and pushed for improved ties, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The call came the same day that the US Supreme Court backed a law banning TikTok unless it is sold by its China-based parent company. “We both attach great importance to interaction, hope for
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
CYBERSCAM: Anne, an interior decorator with mental health problems, spent a year and a half believing she was communicating with Brad Pitt and lost US$855,259 A French woman who revealed on TV how she had lost her life savings to scammers posing as Brad Pitt has faced a wave of online harassment and mockery, leading the interview to be withdrawn on Tuesday. The woman, named as Anne, told the Seven to Eight program on the TF1 channel how she had believed she was in a romantic relationship with the Hollywood star, leading her to divorce her husband and transfer 830,000 euros (US$855,259). The scammers used fake social media and WhatsApp accounts, as well as artificial intelligence image-creating technology to send Anne selfies and other messages
RSS