[Channel 4 News]

Last year Channel 4 broadcast Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, a critically-acclaimed and RTS Award winning forensic investigation into the events of the last few weeks of the decades-long war between the government of Sri Lanka and the rebel forces of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE), presented by Jon Snow. It featured devastating video evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity captured on mobile phones by both victims and perpetrators - some of the most horrific footage Channel 4 has ever broadcast.

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[Channel 4 News]

A plane chartered by the British government is to deport about 100 Tamil asylum seekers to Sri Lanka, according to a human rights charity. Human Rights Watch claims the aircraft will fly the Tamils back to the country where they could face interrogation and torture.

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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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[UN News Centre]

[Channel 4 News]

The UN has already found that evidence of the killing of up to 40,000 civilians amid allegations of serious human rights abuses amounted to “credible allegations” that war crimes had been committed during the last days of the civil war in 2009.

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[BBC]

David Cameron has pressed for progress on a range of human rights issues during the Commonwealth summit.

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[AFP]

Sri Lanka’s government on Thursday sought to dismiss war crimes allegations as propaganda from its defeated rivals, as it came under further pressure ahead of a Commonwealth summit.

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[Huffington Post]

The Sri Lankan government is in hot pursuit of U.S. businesses, seeking to usher in more investment dollars to help rebuild the country following the end of the civil war two years ago. Jobs that help to grow the economy and benefit all Sri Lankans are welcome. But companies are on notice that the Sri Lanka government is following ethnically discriminatory policies, and those that favor only certain segments of the population — wittingly or not — are compounding the ethnic divides that caused the 26-year war in the first place.

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[Human Rights Watch]

In a report released last month Human Rights Watch called on the US government to launch criminal investigations into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by senior Bush administration officials. The 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” presents substantial information warranting criminal investigations of former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet, for ordering practices such as “waterboarding,” the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured. Such acts violated the Convention against Torture, the Geneva Conventions, and other international treaties binding on the United States.

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[Human Rights Watch]

The Sri Lankan government’s failure to bring to justice those responsible for the execution-style slaying of 17 aid workers five years ago highlights a broader lack of will to prosecute soldiers and police for rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said today. Despite strong evidence of involvement by the security forces in the killings, government inquiries have languished and no one has been arrested for the crime.

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