[Human Rights Watch]

Your Excellency,

We write to urge your delegation to work with other member and observer states of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) to bring the issue of accountability for wartime abuses in Sri Lanka onto the agenda of the Council during its March 2012 session. Almost three years after the end of the military conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the government has not kept its commitments to the people of Sri Lanka, the UN Secretary-General, and the Human Rights Council to undertake credible measures to provide justice and accountability for the widespread and serious wartime abuses.

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[Amnesty USA]

I’ve been waiting for months for the final report from Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (often referred to as the “LLRC”).  The commission had been appointed by President Rajapaksa in May 2010 to examine events during the last seven years of the war between the government and the Tamil Tigers (the war ended in May 2009 with the government’s victory over the Tigers).

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[Global Post]

The Sri Lankan government’s efforts to erase from history the final months of its 25-year-long war against Tamil separatists hit a snag this week, as humanitarian organizations blasted the report of an internal probe into alleged human rights violations and possible war crimes as a whitewash.

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[Channel 4 News]

Channel 4’s Head of News & Current Affairs Dorothy Byrne has commissioned ITN Productions to make a follow-up film to Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, Jon Snow’s critically-acclaimed investigation into the final weeks of the war between the government and Tamil Tigers.

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[ABC News]

Australian politicians are calling for an international investigation of apparent war crimes in Sri Lanka. A documentary aired on ABC1’s Four Corners on Monday night showed allegations of rape, torture and murder of civilians during Sri Lanka’s civil war.

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[Huffington Post]

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to India this week offers a vital opportunity for the world’s two greatest democracies to jointly promote their common values supporting freedom and civil rights in South Asia — a region where extremism and China’s influence continues to grow. More specifically, the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue must include a strategy for protecting human rights and fundamental democratic principles in Sri Lanka. Two years have passed since the end of the island-nation’s 26-year civil war, yet little has been done to address the underlying causes of the conflict.

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[National Post]

A Canadian man has returned to Toronto after spending three years in the custody of Sri Lanka’s anti-terrorism police, whom he said detained him until he signed a false confession saying he had smuggled equipment to the Tamil Tigers rebels.

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[HRW]

Human Rights Watch is concerned about the failure of the Sri Lankan government to investigate well-founded allegations of very serious abuses that took place during the last months of its decades-long internal armed conflict, which ended in May 2009.

[Amnesty International USA]

This week marks the second anniversary of the end of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, between government forces and the opposition Tamil Tigers.  The Tigers were seeking an independent state for the Tamil minority on the island.  As documented by Amnesty International and a recent U.N. panel report, there are credible reports that both sides committed gross abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law, including war crimes.  Yet no one has been held accountable for these crimes.

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[ HRW ]

The United Nations Human Rights Council on May 27 passed a deeply flawed resolution on Sri Lanka that ignores calls for an international investigation into alleged abuses during recent fighting and other pressing human rights concerns, Human Rights Watch said today. The council held a special session on May 26 and 27, 2009, on the human rights situation in Sri Lanka, a week after the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by government forces. “The Human Rights Council did not even express its concern for the hundreds of thousands of people facing indefinite detention in government camps,” said Juliette de Rivero, Geneva advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “The council ignored urgent needs and wasted an important chance to promote human rights.”