Bishop Tutu opposes UNHRC seat for Lanka

Nobel peace laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has said that Sri Lanka does not deserve a seat in the UN Human Rights Council due to its worsening human rights record.

"In the entire world, Sri Lanka stands out as the most clearly unqualified state seeking election to the council this year, and the place where things are getting unambiguously worse," he wrote in a opinion column that appeared on the web site of the Guardian Newspaper in UK on May 15.

Sri Lanka is heavily canvassing to retain its seat in the 47 member council with Human Rights and Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe leading a high ranking delegation to Geneva recently to lobby other member states.

Before Bishop’s Tutu’s opinion piece international human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International too had said that Sri Lanka should not get a seat in the council. The re-election vote will be held on May 21.

"Defeating the Sri Lankan candidacy would be a comfort to the people of Sri Lanka. It would place international pressure on the government to respect human rights, and to accept a UN human rights monitoring mission, which it has stubbornly refused.

"It would help make the council a place where true human rights leaders in all regions can help lead the world towards greater respect for human life and human dignity. An outcome, in short, that would benefit those who care about human rights in the world. Any other result would be a travesty," Bishop Tutu wrote.

He said that the country’s human rights record had worsened after joining the council two years back. "Sri Lanka has failed to honour its pledges of upholding human rights standards and cooperating with the UN since joining the council two years ago. Indeed, its human rights record has worsened during that time. The Sri Lankan idea of cooperation with the UN, meanwhile, has been to condemn senior UN officials (including the high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, and the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, John Holmes) as "terrorists" or "terrorist sympathisers."

He also blamed the government as well as the Tigers for abuses — "The systematic abuses by Sri Lankan government forces are among the most serious imaginable. Government security forces summarily remove their own citizens from their homes and families in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Torture and extra judicial killings are widespread. When the Human Rights Council was established, UN members required that states elected must themselves "uphold the highest standards" of human rights. On that count, Sri Lanka is clearly disqualified.

The separatist Tamil Tigers have used despicable tactics in their war against the government, including frequent suicide bombings. But that can in no way excuse the scale of government abuses, the Bishop has said.