Human Rights Council and General Assembly have failed to respond to crisis in Sri Lanka

Diplomatic Editor, “President faces HR fire at UN“, Sunday Times (Colombo), 23 September 2007:

On the eve of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s address to the United Nationa General Assembly, the world body has expressed serious concerns over ‘’a spate of extrajudicial executions'’ by the military, paramilitary forces and insurgent groups in Sri Lanka.

A damning report by Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Summary and Arbitrary Executions, states that in presenting the report to the General Assembly last year, Mr. Alston warned that “Sri Lanka was on the brink of a crisis of major proportions.”

“Since that time, the situation has indeed erupted into crisis and neither the Human Rights Council (in Geneva) nor the General Assembly (in New York) has seen fit to take any action to address the spate of extra-judicial executions being reported out of that country,” he says in a new report to the 192-member General Assembly, which began its 62nd sessions last week. Mr. Alston has implicitly urged both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly to penalize the government for its human rights abuses.

The report castigating Sri Lanka comes on the eve of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s address to the General Assembly. He is due to speak on Tuesday afternoon, and is scheduled to meet Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday.

Philip Alston’s full report is available here.