By, P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Colombo : Sri Lanka may be heading towards serious difficulties, with the US Congress proposing stringent conditions for arms aid to it, and a key international human rights body downgrading its national rights organization after citing major lapses.
According to reports from Washington, the US Congress has stipulated that the Secretary of State will have to certify that the Sri Lankan government has taken certain specified steps towards ensuring human rights in the war-torn country before military aid is given.
Earlier, the International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights – the world body that regulates national human rights institutions – reduced Sri Lanka’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to the status of “observer” because the government had encroached on its independence and the commission had neglected its duties.
If the US Congress passes the $500 billion plus defence allocation bill this week, and President George W. Bush signs it, Sri Lanka will not get any appreciable military aid from America unless the Secretary of State certifies that it has prosecuted military personnel alleged to have helped recruit child soldiers and committed extra-judicial executions; and provided humanitarian groups and reporters access to the Tamil areas of the country.
The US also wants to know if Sri Lanka had agreed to allow the UN to establish a human rights monitoring office in the country.
Observers say that Sri Lanka will find it hard to meet these conditions.
It has consistently denied the involvement of its armed forces in child recruitment and extra judicial killings.
Even now, humanitarian groups find it difficult to function in the war-affected Tamil areas because they are constantly accused of clandestinely aiding the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Even a visit by Unicef’s country head, Phillipe Duamelle, to the LTTE’s headquarters in Kilinochchi recently, to talk about the release of child soldiers, came under flak from the government because he had not taken prior permission from the foreign ministry.
The Sri Lankan government has time and again categorically rejected calls for the setting up of a UN rights monitoring office in the country, saying that it will mean an erosion of the country’s sovereignty and the devaluation of its own institutions.
As for the official National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), its claims to independence “ring hollow” said Elaine Pearson, Asia Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in a press release Monday.
According to HRW, the international committee downgraded the NHRC because the appointment of its commissioners by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in May 2006 was not according to Sri Lankan law.
The NHRC had, without any good reason, stopped follow up action in as many as 2000 cases of disappearance in July 2006. It had refused to adequately investigate “hundreds” of new cases of disappearance in the past two years.
In a note dated June 29, 2006, the secretary of the NHRC had said that it had decided to stop inquiring into these complaints “for the time being, unless special directions are received from the government”.
In June 2007, the NHRC issued a circular saying that only cases which had been filed within three months of the incident in question should be taken up, when, in fact, there was no such legal stipulation, the HRW pointed out.
“The commission’s lack of independence has reduced it to a mute witness of rising rights abuses in Sri Lanka. To address the intensifying abuses by all sides in Sri Lanka’s war, the government should welcome a United Nations human rights monitoring mission,” the HRW said.