Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In the past, the leverage that the Commonwealth used when countries headed in this direction was to begin a process of staged disengagement and sanctions, of which expulsion is the last step. But there is a series of interim steps: suspension, a committee of inquiry, and the creation of a sanctions committee.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  As some members of the committee may know, Canada has been providing funding for the translation into Tamil of the reports of the LLRC, for example, so that Tamil Sri Lankans can have access to those documents and understand them, and they can therefore assess how they might engage.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No. To be fair there were some recommendations in the LLRC about reconciliation, about actually dealing with the hundreds of names that are still missing. Some people estimate they are in fact in the thousands. The notion of having a process whereby war crimes can be addressed, they have made these recommendations, and I think they are worthwhile.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  There's no question about it. I said in my report to the minister and the Prime Minister that there has been significant investment by the Colombo administration in what I would call the infrastructure of economic growth and opportunity—roads, hospitals, schools. There has been almost no investment in the infrastructure of civility and rule of law.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The only development that I have seen is the notion of having a “census of the dead”. The hope is that there would be some record that might begin to put into hard data who disappeared and when they disappeared. There are many families who have no idea where their civilian family members are as a result of the war that ended in 2009.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  As was said to us by one of the law professors with whom we met, you cannot have a process of reconciliation until someone admits that something bad happened. It may have happened on both sides. There may not be just one group of people at fault. But we should look at the remarkable example set by our commonwealth brothers and sisters in South Africa, with their Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No, it's not. About 40 years ago, she did not attend a meeting after Prime Minister Heath had agreed to sell arms to the apartheid regime of South Africa. For various reasons her schedule didn't make her presence possible at that session, but to the best of my knowledge, that is the only time since the inception of this organization and her titular headship of it that she has been unable to attend.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee today. I was in Sri Lanka from late March to early April as Canada's Special Envoy to the Commonwealth. My role was not to comment on a sovereign nation's domestic affairs or on the bilateral relations between Canada and Sri Lanka, but rather to assess the situation on the ground with regard to the Commonwealth's fundamental values.