TGTE Urges US/UN Ambassador to Help Initiate Sri Lanka Intl. Investigation Under UN Article 99

TGTE is mobilizing international civil society to apply moral pressure on the UN Secretary General, to appoint an international investigation on Sri Lanka.

(NEW YORK) - In a letter sent to the US Ambassador to the UN Ms. Samantha Power, the Prime Minister of Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE)Mr. Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, urged Ms. Power to exercise US diplomatic and moral power to persuade UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to appoint an International Investigation on Sri Lanka, under Article 99 of the UN Charter.

It was pointed out in that letter that UN’s Expert Panel Report on Sri Lanka, the UN Internal Review Report on Sri Lanka and one of the UN Expert Panelist Professor Steven Ratner have all concluded that there is neither the political environment nor the judicial environment in Sri Lanka for dispensing justice domestically. (Accountability and the Sri Lankan Civil War 106 Am. J. Int'l L, 795). Thus justice can be achieved only through international means.

Given the political considerations prevalent in the UN Human Rights Council, the TGTE believes an international investigation could be established under Article 99 of the U.N. Charter. The letter noted that U.N. Secretary General’s own legal advisors, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Crisis Group also espoused this same opinion.

Tolerating impunity sets a bad precedent for other countries emulating the “Sri Lankan solution” in addressing their own national conflicts. Needless to say, this is a threat to international peace and security.

TGTE congratulates Samantha Powers on her Senate Confirmation of her appointment as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N.

TGTE is mobilizing international civil society to apply moral pressure on the UN Secretary General, to appoint an international investigation on Sri Lanka.

It was brought to Ambassador Power’s attention that the TGTE is in the process of collecting endorsements from 1000 Non- Government organizations for investigations on Sri Lanka under Article 99 of the U.N. Charter.

Tamils have faced repeated mass killings since 1958 and that the killings in 2009 prompted UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to appoint a Panel of Experts to report on the scale of killings. According to this UN report tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed in five months due to deliberate and intense shelling and bombing of areas designated by the government as "no-fire zones", where Tamil civilians had assembled for safety.

The Sri Lankan Government also restricted food and medicine for Tamils, resulting in large numbers of people dying from starvation and many of the injured bleeding to death.

According to the UN Panel, the killings and other abuses that took place amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Independent experts believe that there are elements of these abuses that constitute an act of genocide.

The UN Human Rights Council looked into this mass killing and passed two Resolutions on accountability for these international crimes in 2012 and 2013.

According to Bishop of Mannar, Dr. Rayappu Joseph, 146,679 Tamils went missing when Sri Lankan forces attacked Tamil people. Members of the Sri Lankan security forces are almost exclusively from the Sinhalese community and the victims are all from the Tamil community.