Sri Lankans protest against US envoy Rapp’s visit

Friday, 10 January 2014 00:11 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

REUTERS: Hundreds of Sri Lankans gathered outside the US embassy on Thursday (9) to protest against the visit of the Ambassador-at-large in the Office of Global Criminal Justice, Stephen J. Rapp. The US State department said Rapp, who is in Sri Lanka until Saturday (11) will meet government officials and political and civil society leaders to discuss issues focusing on the country’s justice, accountability and reconciliation processes.

The visit comes ahead of a UN review of Colombo’s human rights record, following the decades-long separatist war. “This is part of the vast campaign that is been carried out by America to bring our Government to disrepute at the next sessions in March and place us against the wall and prove that we have committed human rights violations.” Gunadasa Amarasekara, Organiser of the Patriotic National Front, told journalists outside the embassy. The UN Human Rights Council meets in March to discuss whether Sri Lanka has shown any progress reining in alleged rights abuses and investigating suspected war crimes. The UN estimates that the conflict for a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils in the Sinhalese-majority nation cost at least 100,000 lives between 1972 and 2009. Sri Lanka has consistently denied that large scale human rights violations took place during the last phase of the war.