As the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council continues, Jaffna MP C V Wigneswaran has arranged for a conference entitled “Loss of the Tamil Homeland: Identifying issues and creating strategies to preserve Tamil land”.
Leader of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) R. Sampanthan, alongside former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navaneetham (Navi) Pillay, and leading human rights lawyers David Matas CM and Cherie Blair CBE QC are expected to speak at said conference.
This conference follows a damning report by the current UN High Commissioner which highlighted the deterioration of human rights in Sri Lanka and warned of a “heightened risk of future violations”. Her report calls on member states to take “strong preventative action” including “asset freezes and travel bans” and to consider referring Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court. Her call for strong international action has been supported by a number of senior former and current UN officials including Navi Pillay.
In her statement, Pillay highlighted the government’s “failure to make any meaningful progress towards accountability for international crimes, reparation for victims, or accountability for disappearances and land dispossessions”. She further noted that Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s President, “was the minister of defence and commander of the armed forces during the conflict and is named in various reports as the individual most responsible for mass violations during the final attack in 2009”.
In January Tamil political parties, civil society organisations and victim-survivors groups united behind a common platform, calling for declaring that there is "no scope" for a domestic accountability mechanism within Sri Lanka and jointly called for an international accountability process, including a referral to the International Criminal Court to investigate the charge of genocide.
