Thank you, Mr. Reid, and members of the committee. I'm very pleased to be here.
As Alex said, I'm a volunteer coordinator with Amnesty and am focused on Sri Lanka. I've been to the country ten times. It's been a fascinating and pleasurable experience for me to be there, notwithstanding the horrible things that have been occurring there for the last 30 years or so. I've been there as a tourist, actually, just visiting out of interest. On each occasion I've been there, I have looked up the Canadian High Commissioner to get her or his advice about where to go in the country and where it is safe, but also to discuss the human rights situation, as I became active within Amnesty.
On two instances I was part of the election monitoring team organized locally in Sri Lanka, called PAFFREL. It's the official election monitoring group within Sri Lanka. It is fascinating organizing about 10,000 people to monitor an election. On one occasion, it was a national election in 2004. Most recently I was part of the monitoring team in Batticaloa, the city on the east coast of Sri Lanka that had its first election in 14 years in 2008. Being there as part of the election monitoring team and travelling in the northern part of the country during the national election and then in the east in Batticaloa, as well as my own trips, of course, I've had a fascinating experience. It's obviously been educational.
I'm so glad to be here because, frankly, it's frustrating to deal with the situation in Sri Lanka right now. Amnesty clearly is promoting human rights there and elsewhere in the world. Our frustration and challenge—and it's not just Amnesty's challenge, but probably Canada's challenge too—is to engage the Sri Lankan government.
Over many years we have commented on human rights in Sri Lanka, with 1971, some 40 years ago, being the first time Amnesty commented on incidents in Sri Lanka. Since then, we have regularly had missions to Sri Lanka and, of course, have commented increasingly on the tragedy in the country in the last number of years.
Right now, the Sri Lankan government is asserting that it should determine its own future. It does not want interference by organizations like Amnesty, or countries like Canada for that matter. In other words, it's asserting strongly its own sovereignty. It wants to determine what it wants to do on its own. On a broad level, Amnesty is sympathetic to people in their own countries standing up for their human rights and deciding their own future. Our problem, however, is that human rights are just not being respected in Sri Lanka.
I want to be clear in the few minutes I have. The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission was appointed by the Sri Lankan government in May 2010 at the end of the conflict in May 2009 in an attempt to foster discussion among people in the country and reconciliation, as the name of the group implies. However, Amnesty has had great trouble with that commission, because we just don't believe that the mandate or the process by which the Lessons Learnt committee is proceeding is going to establish the truth and justice. This conclusion is derived in part from a report by Amnesty, “Twenty Years of Make Believe”, published in June 2009, a month after the end of the conflict in May 2009. The simple argument in “Twenty Years of Make Believe” is that every one of the commissions or investigations and inquiries established by the Sri Lankan government to examine human rights violations or establish what happened around particular incidents did not result in justice for any of the victims. There was nothing there.
Granted, there was the problem of the war but the legal process was just not followed through. Amnesty argued strongly in June 2009 that a domestic or national evaluation of what's going on in Sri Lanka was just not credible and concluded, based on 20 years of experience, that the government just could not handle such an evaluation. Various other organizations agreed with us.
With the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, Amnesty joined with Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group—headed by a Canadian, Louise Arbour, as I presume you know. It is a fascinating group that does excellent human rights work internationally. All three international human rights-oriented groups, through our research contacts and visits to Sri Lanka, reached a similar conclusion to that in the Amnesty brief. Therefore, all three organizations declined to participate in the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission.
A letter was sent to the commission in October 2010, the same year it was established. It suggested that there was nothing in the LLRC mandate that required it to investigate the many credible allegations of violations of humanitarian law and human rights law by both the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan government, particularly in the last months of the war. The last months of the war were just horrendous in 2009, and yet the LLRC did not have a mandate to look into those problems.
Also, the LLRC did not require any official of the government who came before it to explain government misrepresentation—and really, that's what it was—of the number of civilians who were in the northern part of Sri Lanka in the Vanni area, where the fighting was taking place and which the Tamil Tigers had controlled for a number of years. The government insisted there were 100,000 civilians in early 2009, but months later was forced to admit there were actually 300,000. In other words, the situation was much more serious than the human rights organizations were arguing.
The LLRC has to deal with that problem. The LLRC did not establish that fact while hearing its testimony.
Another process question that we had was this. The LLRC did not provide any protection for the witnesses who appeared before it, and yet in the context of the discussion and threats going on within the country, that was absolutely crucial. International law requires, in practice, that witnesses for investigations like this be offered some kind of protection for offering testimony.
I would note that the LLRC is due to report this Sunday, that is, to give its report to the president of Sri Lanka. The president has made it clear that the report will go forward to the parliament and presumably be debated. We are assuming that the recommendations or some of the main points coming out of the LLRC will be made public—or that there will be public speculation about them—maybe next week. We'll see.
However, the point we want to make is that the Sri Lankan government is not correct in arguing that Amnesty has pre-judged what they are saying. We are criticizing the mandate, criticizing the process—the points that I just made. So whatever the LLRC recommends, in fact, is just not credible, based on the whole process of the thing.
Let me conclude by identifying a few particular problems in Sri Lanka right now.
The armed conflict ended in May 2009, but human rights violations are continuing. I see Roy beside us. Roy will explain his own particular case. Just a couple of weeks ago, in its presentation to the committee against torture at the UN in Geneva, Amnesty in fact referred to Roy's case and the abuse he suffered. Roy can talk about his own case, but it's one strong indication that there are still ongoing violations concerning people who are in detention.
In that same report, Amnesty cited that ten people had died in police custody during the year 2010, all under suspicious and very similar circumstances, raising clear questions about what kind of police involvement there was.
In sum, Amnesty has serious problems about how the process is continuing or going ahead to resolve the human rights situation in Sri Lanka.
The government says it wants to reconcile with all parts of the country, and it has said literally that it is open to the Tamils, having fought and defeated the Tamil Tigers. Amnesty's great problem is that it appointed the LLRC without any consultation with the Tamils. Admittedly, they're in touch now with the Tamil National Alliance and beginning to talk about reconciliation. But this is a little late.
We emphasize that it's absolutely crucial that the government involve the whole population in Sri Lanka in order to go ahead credibly. Unless they do that, we believe that human rights violations will clearly continue and, in fact, probably be encouraged by the fact of there not being a credible process.
We hope that this committee can lend Canada's voice...and this is something that Alex will be able to argue ably.
Thank you very much.