Category: Articles

After having consulted, either the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), or UN headquarters, in New York, or both, the UN mission, in Colombo, in April, last year, said that the issue of confidentiality of sources/eyewitnesses needed to be considered at a later stage.

The Colombo mission was responding to a query by The Island whether the UN would review UNSG Ban ki moon’s Panel of Experts (PoE) recommendation, pertaining to confidentiality of sources/eyewitnesses for a 20-year period, with effect from the date of the release of the report. The recommendation was made in PoE’s report, released on March 31, 2011.

The upcoming visit to Sri Lanka of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances could be ‘the thin end of a large wedge,’ leading critics of Sri Lanka’s domestic mechanisms to demand more international interventions, a former diplomat has warned. While adherence to international human rights standards is a must, respect for our own ability as a mature state to deal with issues of this nature must not be compromised, says Palitha Kohona, Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the UN in New York from 2009 to 2015.

Dr Kohona was among several ‘non-career diplomats’ recalled after the recent change of government. He was Sri Lanka’s Foreign Secretary from 2007 to 2009. His experience with the UN pre-dates his posting to New York. He was the Chief of the UN’s Treaty Section from 1995 to 2005, during which he introduced seminal changes to the work of the Section. Having started his career as an Australian diplomat, he led trade delegations to the UNCTAD Trade and Development Board meetings, negotiated bilateral trade and investment agreements and was posted to Australia’s Permanent Mission to the UN in Geneva in 1989. In 2006 at the invitation of President Rajapaksa he assumed duties as Secretary General of the Government Peace Secretariat.

I quote below a text extracted from Google on Goebbels Principle’. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or...

The Opposition yesterday demanded to know from the government whether Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera had obtained prior permission from the President, the Prime Minister or the Cabinet of Ministers to have talks with the members of Global Tamil Forum, a banned pro-LTTE terrorist group in London.

Leader of the Opposition Nimal Siripala de Silva, making a special statement, said there were reports that Foreign Minister Samaraweera had held talks with the GTF, which had been acting against the national interests of Sri Lanka promoting separatist agenda and destroying Sri Lanka’s image at international forums. “There were further reports that the meeting had been facilitated by some non-governmental organisations based in South Africa, several Norwegian organisations and was attended by representatives of a political party in Sri Lanka and an MP of that party.