Rights panel resigns

 

 An international advisory panel said yesterday it was resigning over Sri Lanka's refusal to properly investigate alleged human rights abuses, as a new report blamed the government for the abductions of hundreds of people.

The developments were likely to increase international calls for a UN mission to monitor abuses committed during the surge in fighting between Sri Lankan forces and ethnic Tamil separatists over the past two years.

The government has long rejected such a mission and established several advisory panels in an attempt to allay international concerns over killings, abductions and forcible disappearances plaguing the country.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa created the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons to oversee a government commission investigating 16 human rights cases.

The 11-member panel consistently criticised the government commission as lethargic and accused the attorney general's office of "serious conflicts of interest".

In a statement yesterday, the panel said its suggestions were routinely ignored or rejected and the government probe had "fallen far short of the transparency and compliance with basic international norms and standards pertaining to investigations and inquiries."

"Rajapaksa, once a rights advocate, has now led his government to become one of the world's worst perpetrators of forced disappearances," Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Elaine Pearson said.

"We absolutely deny the exaggerated allegations reflected in the report," said Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona.

"The report talks about a situation which is getting worse by the minute, and I think it is not only unfair, it is malicious.

"They are not exactly serious allegations. They are concocted in our view or exaggerated in order to give the country a bad name."

"Over the last 12 months, the situation has improved considerably."

The former Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission enraged the government by accusing state security forces of massacring 17 members of international aid group Action Contre la Faim in 2006 - the worst attack on aid workers since the 2003 bomb attack on the UN office in Baghdad.