News: Jehan Perera

(March 23, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has reaffirmed his determination to appoint a panel of experts to advise him on Sri Lanka’s adherence to its international obligations pertaining to human rights. This has evoked a predictably negative response from the Sri Lankan government and, indeed, the more nationalist sections of civil society, whose position was that the elimination of the LTTE was necessary even at high cost for the restoration of normalcy in the country. The government’s consistent position on this issue has been that whatever happened during the period of the war with the LTTE, and subsequently, is an internal matter. The government has also been very critical of those international and local organizations that have called for investigations into the allegations of human rights violations, with the local ones feeling more under threat than their international counterparts.