Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.

A legal definition is found in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

I believe that since independence  the acts perpetrated by the Government of Sri Lanka on the Tamils including the burning down of the Jaffna Library, the refusal to act on the Vattakottai resolution, disappearances of Tamil individuals, refusal to allow Tamil to be an official language of Sri Lanka, firing on the so-called "safe zone", the relocation of Tamils and moving in of Sinhalese into traditional Tamil areas, and the use of concentration- style camps for internally displaced Tamils should be classed as Genocide.

I will work with the Tamils to get the acts perpetrated on the Tamils classed legally as a genocide so that the UN Convention can be used to address the problems.
Dr Rachel Joyce
Conservative Parliamentary Candidate, Harrow West
Website: www.racheljoyce. org.uk
Rachel’s Blog: http://racheljoyce. blogspot. com