Ban Ki Moon must act on war crimes

Last June a panel of experts was appointed to advise the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) on ‘accountability issues’ in Sri Lanka. In April, they presented Ban Ki Moon with a report of their findings, which found that there were credible allegations of both sides committing war crimes and of the Government of Sri Lanka’s culpability in summary executions, disappearances, and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. You can read the report here. Not surprisingly this immediately provoked the Sri Lankan government to dismiss the report as ‘fundamentally flawed’.

Along with the reports from the prominent human rights organizations, this much delayed UN report must lead to an international investigation into allegations of war crimes committed by both sides during the final stages of the war, as the report itself recommends.

We welcome the UNSG’s office making the panel’s report publicly available but we are dismayed that the UNSG claims he lacks the authority to order an inquiry into the mass killings without the consent of the Sri Lankan government, which is not a member of the international criminal court, or a decision by an appropriate international forum of member states. Human Rights Watch have already disagreed, rightly. Having fought to establish the panel, the UN Secretary-General has a responsibility to finish what he started and implement the recommendations of his own report.

If you signed our last petition thank you, this has contributed to the Advisory Panel’s report being finally released. Please sign our new petition urging Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary-General to set up a credible international process for investigating what the UN report calls ‘credible allegations’.

Help us put pressure on Ban Ki Moon to act on the report NOW by signing this petition

Please also take a few seconds to tell your friends and family about this petition by sending this link [http://www.srilankacampaign.org/takeaction.htm] to them via email, facebook, twitter, or however you see fit.

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(If you would prefer to send your own message, you are free to edit this)

Dear Secretary-General, All of us who follow the situation in Sri Lanka were gladdened by your decision to make the Advisory Panel’s report public, in spite of the belligerent and distasteful attempts by the Sri Lankan Government to withhold the report. The Sri Lankan government’s response to their being provided with an early copy of the report has been to leak or ‘spin’ it for their own purposes, consistent with its earlier characterisation of your Advisory Panel as an ‘unwarranted and unnecessary interference with a sovereign nation’. We therefore strongly urge you to take immediate action to establish an ‘independent international mechanism’ to investigate the credible allegations that both the government and Tamil Tiger rebels committed serious violations in the months before the decades-long war ended in May 2009. To do anything less is to further humiliate and oppress the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have been harmed by this war and continue to be victimised even now, some two years after the war ended. It is for all these reasons that we implore you to act NOW.

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