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Lord Naseby accuses UK, US of double standards over Sri Lanka
View(s):From Neville de Silva in London
Lord Naseby, president of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Sri Lanka, has accused Britain and the United States of double standards in asking the UN Human Rights Commissioner to investigate allegations of war-time abuses by Sri Lanka whereas Britain’s role in the Iraq war was investigated by British judges and privy councillors with no foreign involvement.
Speaking at the House of Lords debate on the recently released John Chilcot report that was largely critical of Britain’s role in the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, Lord Naseby said Britain and US had called for Sri Lanka’s war against the “terrorist” Tamils Tigers to be investigated by the UN Human Rights Commissioner in Geneva along with foreign judges while in the case of the Iraq war domestic investigators were considered sufficient.
“This is wrong and misconceived,” Lord Naseby told the House of Lords. He said there was a parallel with Sri Lanka as Britain was also engaged in tackling terrorism in the form of weapons of mass destruction. He said the key elements of International Humanitarian Law relating to the targeting of military objectives during a conflict were set out in the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention and were mentioned in the Chilcot report.
Sri Lanka, however, was not assessed under the Geneva Convention and instead Britain and the US endorsed investigations by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Lord Naseby argued that there were in Sri Lanka a “reasonable number of fair-minded judges across the ethnic groups who could undertake the task of judging what happened against the principles of the Geneva Convention.”