NPP'S BALANCING ACT IN HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUES

The National People’s Power (NPP) government has rejected the decade old recommendation by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk to establish an international mechanism for accountability for human rights violations committed during the war between the armed forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

- By M.S.M. Ayub

The high commissioner's latest recommendation came in his annual report on Sri Lanka and Foreign Affairs. Minister Vijitha Herath rejected it on September 8, the first day of the 60th Regular Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Minister Herath instead told the council that Sri Lanka is committed to establishing a domestic mechanism for the purpose, a commitment made by several past governments as well. He was of the view that an international mechanism would undermine ongoing domestic efforts to ensure justice and reconciliation, thus signaling that the NPP government would reject the resolution on Sri Lanka's human rights situation that is to be presented to the council later at the session, as it did last year.

Unlike the governments headed by Rajapakses, rejection of a resolution on human rights violations by a government led by a party that has been a victim of two bloody suppressions in recent history, sacrificing over 70,000 of lives of its supporters and sympathisers is an irony. It was said that over 10,000 people were killed in the first insurrection of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the prime constituent party of the current ruling NPP in 1971, and over 60,000 had perished during their second insurrection in 1988/89.

Although the NPP had opposed the foreign interventions in Sri Lanka's human rights issues, Lord Avebury visited Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, on behalf of Amnesty International, in the aftermath of the JVP’s first insurrection, to report on the human rights situation in the island -- interestingly at the invitation of former Parliamentarian the late Prince Gunasekara, a prominent JVP supporter.