No visas for UN war crimes panel

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka on Thursday ruled out giving visas to members of a UN panel looking into possible war crimes.

For more than a year the country has defied Western pressure over accountability for potential war crimes and human rights violations in the last stages of its quarter-century war with the separatist Tamil Tigers, which it won in May 2009.

Foreign Minister G L Peiris said the government would not issue visas to the UN panel, which the world body says is merely there to advise Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on methods of accountability, and is not an investigative body.”We will not issue visas to the panel. We don’t think we need them,” Peiris told reporters.

Sri Lanka has its own commission looking into the last seven years of the war and insists that despite a three-decade history of ineffectual local investigations into rights violations, this one will uncover any wrongdoing.

Published in The express Tribune, June 25^th, 2010.