THE United Nations is able to investigate the war crimes which occurred recently in Sri Lanka, British human rights lawyer and international war crimes judge, Geoffrey Robertson QC said Sunday.
The avenues for the UN include the UN Human Rights Committee, which can investigate individuals’ complaints against states under the International Convention on Human Rights, to which Sri Lanka is a signatory.
The UN Human Rights Council, by contrast, is a ‘highly politicised’ body staffed by diplomats of various countries, including those abusing human rights, rather than human rights experts, he said.
Robertson has served as an appeal judge at the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2002-2007 and is presently on the UN’s Internal Justice Council.
Having been counsel in many landmark cases in constitutional, criminal and media law in the courts of Britain and the Commonwealth, Robertson makes frequent appearances in the Privy Council and the European Court of Human Rights.
Asked on BBC radio about the UN Human Rights Council’s acceptance last week, by majority vote, of a self-congratulatory resolution tabled by Sri Lanka, Robertson said he wasn’t surprised.
‘Well, the Human Rights Council is a highly politicised body.
‘It is made up not of experts on human rights, but of paltering diplomats. Europe only has seven seats . . .
‘We have countries like Russia and China obviously concerned to keep their own internal problems down and away from international oversight.
‘So the decision on Sri Lanka is not really surprising.
‘However that’s not the end of the story because UN officials can still look into it,’ he said.
‘Sir John Holmes is concerned. Judge Navi Pillay wants to conduct an investigation.
‘More importantly, there is the UN Human Rights Committee which sits in Geneva.
‘It is a kind of court and individuals can complain to it.’
Unusually, Sri Lanka has actually signed up to the International Convention on Human Rights which has this as the body that investigates complaints.
So any individual can complain against Sri Lanka.
‘So there is certainly going to be an inquiry, I would have thought, by the Human Rights Committee.
‘And there are other possibilities – the Convention on Torture, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, even the Genocide Convention, could all be applied in due course,’ Robertson said.
‘So there are ways and means of finding out – fact-finding in effect – as to whether there have been breaches of the Geneva Convention, the targeting of civilians, the bombing of hospitals, and so forth as has been alleged.’
Robertson was asked about Sri Lanka’s continued denial of access to the war-ravaged north where 20,000 Tamil civilians were massacred by Colombo’s military in recent months.
‘The Sri Lankan government kept out the international media so that there would be no immediate eyewitnesses.
‘They allowed the Red Cross in, but it is prevented from giving testimony in international courts. . .
‘That is the quid-pro-quo: they can be in on wars but are not allowed to testify if they see war crimes.
‘Moreover, other humanitarian bodies were kept out and are being kept out.
‘However, Sri Lanka’s actions will in any case eventually come out,’ Robertson said.
‘In the fullness of time, of course, you do have witnesses, you do have thousands of people who were on that dreadful strip of beach,’ he said, in reference to the “no-fire zone” in Mullaitivu where concentrated civilians were pounded by Sri Lankan artillery and planes.
‘Meanwhile, there were mass graves that would be excavated,’ he said.
‘This is the way, unfortunately, war crimes are now dealt with, through forensic investigators finding out the story by investigating mass graves.’
‘And there do seem, from aerial photographs, to be some that can be investigated there.’
Robertson is the author of ‘Crimes against Humanity – The Struggle for Global Justice’, published by Penguin and the New Press (USA), now in its third edition and published in six foreign language editions.
Meanwhile, local Muslim leaders in Ampaa’rai district have expressed concern over the move by central government authority to carve out a Sinhala dominated Divisional Secretariat division in the name of Digavaapi DS division that includes the traditional Muslim villages of Paalamunai, Aalanku’lam, and Mu’l’likulaththumalai, media reports state.
An appeal has been made to Muslim Ministers in the United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) government to stop this plan, Muslim sources in Ampaa’rai said.
Meanwhile, the United Nations deliberately hid the number of Tamil civilians being killed during the Sri Lankan government offensive against the LTTE, according to a report in the French daily Le Monde.
The report, quotes several UN sources alleging that high-ranking UN officials, including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, chose to keep silent about the high civilian death toll so as to avoid offending the Sri Lankan government and maintain UN operations in the country.
A low figure was even leaked by the UN in mid-May, when it was known that the real toll was approaching 20,000 dead.
Speaking to FRANCE 24 from Sri Lanka, Philippe Bolopion, who wrote the piece in Le Monde, said he did not believe the downplayed figures were due to institutional incompetence.
‘I would say their moral compass might have gone wrong,’ said Bolopion, referring to senior UN officials.
‘The most important thing for them was to stay in the country.’
According to Le Monde, a group of experts was put together by the UN to compile casualty figures for Sri Lanka, but only a partial total was leaked to the press.
This leak put the estimated death toll at 7,700 by mid-May, days before the Sri Lankan government declared victory in their offensive against the LTTE.
The 7,700 figure was then widely accepted and used by the international press right up until the end of the conflict despite the daily rises in civilian death tolls, according to the report.
But UN staff working on the ground informed Vijay Nambiar, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s chief of staff, that the final figures ‘would without doubt exceed 20,000 dead,’ the report said.
‘We knew carnage was brewing,’ the paper quoted an unnamed UN official as saying.
‘We rang the alarm bells for some months but no-one ever took the Sri Lankan government to task publicly.’
‘Everyone is scared of having their agency removed from the country,’ another anonymous source told the paper.
According to Le Monde, Nambiar even told UN representatives in Sri Lanka that the UN should ‘keep a low profile’ and play a ‘sustaining role’ that was ‘compatible with the government’.
In recent weeks, Nambiar’s role as the UN’s special envoy in Colombo has come into question, FRANCE 24 said. His brother, Satish, a former Indian general, has been a paid consultant to the Sri Lankan army since 2002.
Shortly after the Sri Lankan army’s official victory declaration, the local head of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Amin Awad, told the Arabic TV station Al Jazeera there were virtually no civilians left in the conflict zone, the article notes.
But the very next day, some 20,000 refugees came out of the conflict zone, having suffered a sustained bombardment.
‘It gave the government a blank cheque to carpet bomb the whole area,’ a UN worker told the Le Monde.
The UN has defended its reticence to give specific casualty figures as the conflict was raging.
‘We absolutely reject the allegation that the UN deliberately downplayed civilian casualties,’ UN spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told FRANCE 24.
‘The UN has publicly and repeatedly said that the number of people killed in recent months has been unacceptably high. What we have are well-informed estimates and not precise verifiable numbers. But the UN has not been shy about the scale of human suffering and civilian casualties.’
But speaking to FRANCE 24, Bolopion said his sources informed him that the UN was not releasing the findings of its staffers on the ground ‘even though they were much more solid than those the UN has used in other conflict zones’.