Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. Thank you for all the good questions.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Well, yes. The way I would frame it is that, certainly, when you have a situation in which you have a military almost entirely of one ethnicity in a context where there is virtually complete impunity for crimes committed by government forces, and has been for many years, and when

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I don't know. It's certainly not absolutely implausible, and it's certainly something that we need to be worried about and to be careful to look at as closely as we can. But I think there are enough problems in Sri Lanka, enough very serious and grave human rights problems for al

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It hasn't taken over entirely, but it's certainly a worrisome aspect. One brother is the secretary to the minister of defence and effectively runs the military. The other brother is the minister of economic development. A third brother is the speaker of the Parliament and plays a

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  On that last question, the UN is a complicated body; there are different aspects of it. The most powerful part of the UN is the Security Council, and on the Security Council, five countries have a veto. Two of them are Russia and China. Both of them are significant supporters of

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  There are a series of different UN rapporteurs on various aspects; I think there are dozens of them. The Sri Lankan government did allow the High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit in August of this past year. She then presented an oral statement to the Human Rights Council,

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. With regard to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, there were really two meetings. There was the meeting as it was represented in the international media and to the rest of the world, in which I think the Canadian Prime Minister's decision not to attend opened the

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  That's a direct and really crucial question, but there's no simple answer. I think one of the things—and I think it began to happen around the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting—is for other governments to stop giving the Rajapaksa government the benefit of the doubt. Stop

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. It's a serious question. It's also a difficult question to answer with any great degree of specificity given the heavily militarized nature of the Northern province particularly. The International Crisis Group released a report a little over two years ago, called “Sri Lanka

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Unfortunately, the steps within Sri Lanka that need to be taken largely need to be taken by the government. As you just pointed out, and as I think as many are beginning to accept, the government doesn't seem interested in using the opening that the election of the provincial cou

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I think specifically with respect to that last question the place to do it is on the UN Human Rights Council, when it meets next month. Both South Africa and India are important members of that council. South Africa was newly re-elected to the council this year. They weren't on t

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  One of the big issues right now is what kind of inquiry the resolution would call for. There are different grades of toughness and seriousness and full resource-ness of the commissions. So what we're calling for is a full-scale classic commission of inquiry that would have powers

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  That's an important question. The exact extent of territory taken by the military or for other government functions or by politically connected businesses is impossible to know—well, it's not impossible, but it's not known. But it's sizeable. The numbers displaced are in the tens

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm not sure I would say all-out tyranny, but certainly there is a growing concentration of power, and there has been during the final years of the war, and I think at that point it was designed in part to control the state apparatus so tightly that they could do whatever they ne

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  To be blunt, the moment for the Commonwealth to act and be an effective sort of check or prompt on the government in Sri Lanka to improve its human rights behaviour, I think, has passed. The moment was in the run-up to CHOGM or at CHOGM, and unfortunately, very few other governme