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Report on rights abuses tendentious, says Colombo

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka on Tuesday said there was no justification for the demand for a special U.N. Observer Mission on Human Rights.

Referring to the Human Rights Watch report “Return to War – Human Rights under Siege”, the Presidential Secretariat here said it was “largely tendentious, and is replete with generalisations”.

The statement said the report referred to issues that had been largely resolved and based on “largely unconfirmed and unsubstantiated allegations and outdated information”.

Government has been engaged in a war of words with several national and international human rights groups on the humanitarian situation triggered by the fighting with the LTTE for over a year.

The Government’s contention is that most of the NGOs are either “ill-informed or motivated”. However, the charge has been strongly refuted by human rights bodies. The Secretariat said the HRW report on the number of persons who had allegedly disappeared and the Internally Displaced Persons was based on unsubstantiated information.

“The work of government agencies to establish the whereabouts of these persons has been ignored. The Report also ignores the fact that the numbers of alleged disappearances and abductions have sharply declined in recent months due to the firm action taken by the Government and the arrest of two criminal gangs.”

Separately, the military claimed that at least seven cadres of Tamil Tigers were killed in different incidents of fighting in the north.

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