Rights group tells UN to vote Sri Lanka off rights council

by Mel Gunasakera

COLOMBO (AFP) - UN members should reject Sri Lanka's re-election bid to the world body's Human Rights Council, a rights group said Tuesday as it accused Colombo of widespread abductions and "disappearances."
Elections to the 47-member council, the UN's leading human rights body, will be held in New York on Wednesday, when candidate countries need an absolute majority -- or 97 votes from the UN's 192 nations -- to be elected.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) branded Sri Lanka one of the world's worst perpetrators of "disappearances" and abductions and described the situation in the island -- torn by a decades-old ethnic war -- as a "national crisis."

UN Human Rights Council members are required to "uphold the highest standards" of human rights and "fully cooperate" with the council, New York-based HRW said in a statement.

Sri Lanka, Bahrain, Japan, Pakistan, South Korea and Timor Leste are running for the four seats allocated to Asian states.

The group noted that three Nobel peace laureates have already called on UN members to reject Sri Lanka.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa charged earlier this month that "the systematic abuses by Sri Lankan government forces are among the most serious imaginable," citing widespread torture and extrajudicial killings.

"Governments owe it to Sri Lankan human rights victims -- and to victims of human rights abuses around the world -- to ensure that the Sri Lankan bid fails," said Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Also this month, Argentina's 1980 Nobel peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel compared the routine "disappearances" and extrajudicial killings allegedly committed by Sri Lankan security forces to the "dirty wars" waged by various Latin American governments against their own citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.

The 2002 Nobel winner and former US president Jimmy Carter asked UN members in mid-May to vote Sri Lanka off the council, citing a "deteriorating human rights record."

According to HRW at least 1,500 people "disappeared" between 2006 and 2007 -- mostly ethnic Tamils living in the island's restive north and east.

A coalition of more than 20 non-governmental organisations from around the world wrote to UN members earlier this year to oppose Sri Lanka's re-election to the council.

It blamed Colombo for a range of serious abuses, including hundreds of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, widespread torture and arbitrary detention.

On its website the group, NGO Coalition for an Effective Human Rights Council, accused Sri Lanka of rejecting the recommendations of UN human rights experts, attacking UN rights officials and refusing to allow international monitoring.

The coalition also noted that the armed separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have long been implicated in serious human rights abuses, but says this provides no justification for alleged government abuses.

Colombo pulled out of a tattered 2002 truce with Tamil rebels in January in the belief that it could defeat the guerrillas.

Tens of thousands of people have died since the rebels launched a separatist campaign in 1972 for autonomy or independence for minority Tamils in the island's north and east in the majority Sinhalese country.