A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
(Full Story)
Search This Blog
Back to 500BC.
==========================
Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Tuesday, July 4, 2017
On Proposed Law To Enable Foreign Countries & International Criminal Tribunals To Prosecute Sri Lankans
A
Bill has been gazetted to incorporate into the law of Sri Lanka, the
provisions of the ‘International Convention for the Protection of All
Persons from Enforced Disappearances’ which was hurriedly signed and
ratified by the present government. Clause 8 of this Bill enables
foreign countries to seek the extradition of a Sri Lankan who is
suspected, accused or convicted of having caused enforced disappearances
in Sri Lanka. When such a request is made, the government of Sri Lanka
is obliged to inform the foreign country of the measures it intends
taking to prosecute or extradite that person. Clause 21 empowers the
executive arm of the State to oversee the full implementation of this
international convention in Sri Lanka and Clause 23 states that this new
law is to override all other written law.
Articles
10 and 11 of the International Convention against Enforced
Disappearances empowers any member State to arrest anybody, even a
foreigner present within its jurisdiction on suspicion of having been
involved in enforced disappearances in any other country. The State that
carries out such an arrest can prosecute the suspect without
extraditing him to his own country. Most significantly, a suspect
arrested in that manner, can be handed over to an international criminal
tribunal even if the suspect’s own country does not come under the
jurisdiction of that international tribunal.
Article
32 of the international Convention (which the Sri Lankan government has
accepted by a separate declaration) enables any member State to
complain to the ten-member ‘Committee on Enforced Disappearances’ in
Geneva that Sri Lanka is not fulfilling her obligations under this
Convention and the Committee can investigate such complaints. Countries
like the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada, never even signed
this Convention. Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Ireland and India
signed it ten years ago in 2007, but never ratified it. Many countries
have kept away from this Convention altogether for the obvious reason
that its provisions have the potential to violate the individual rights
of citizens of the States that join it.
No
one who is prosecuted in the courts of a foreign country or by an
international criminal tribunal which is funded and maintained by
interested foreign governments in relation to a crime allegedly
committed in that person’s home country, can really expect justice. Such
prosecutions are always politically motivated. All the elements that
relate to an enforced disappearance – abduction, illegal confinement,
murder and the illegal disposal of dead bodies etc are more than
adequately covered by the Penal Code and the existing criminal law in
Sri Lanka. The only real purpose of this proposed law will be to give
interested foreign parties an opportunity to interfere in the justice
system in Sri Lanka. Fortunately, according to our legal system and the
judgement given by the Supreme Court in Nallaratnam Singarasa v. The
Attorney General (2006), even an international convention that is signed
and ratified does not become law in this country unless it is expressly
incorporated into local law by Parliament.
Even
though the government in its folly has signed and ratified an
international convention that wiser nations have steered clear of,
Parliament can reduce the damage to some extent by not passing the
legislation to incorporate it into local law. The proposed law is an
attempt to subject our armed forces to international war crimes
prosecutions without using the term ‘war crimes’ and rephrasing it as
‘disappearances’. The use of the word ‘disappearances’ makes this look
like an innocuous attempt to trace missing persons. However the purpose
of this proposed legislation is not to trace missing persons but to hunt
down and prosecute those who won the war against terrorism.