Former Minister G.L. Peiris said yesterday it was tragic that Sri Lanka had co-sponsored the resolution tabled by the US at the UNHRC which termed that the security forces had committed war crimes during the war.

Prof. Peiris rejected claims by some people that the government had been able to mitigate the allegations in the UNHRC report after the January and August elections and other claims that the report would have been worse if former President Mahinda Rajapaksa was in office.

He claimed the report had clearly stated that the security forces had committed illegal killings, arbitrary detentions and arrests, committed rapes and there was ample evidence to prove that army had committed massacre. How can the government say that the report is not serious when it says that it could prove about massacre which is a grave crime in international law,” he said.

Prof. Peiris told a seminar organized on the impact of the UNHRC report that all these allegations had been levelled without any basis and that they had said that the witnesses would not be revealed.

We do not know about the witnesses as they are anonymous and on what basis they had given evidence. These grave allegations had been directed based on such evidence,” he said.

Prof. Peiris said the US resolution which was similar to that of the UNHRC report was partial, politicized and unreasonable and that it had said that the LTTE had never used Hospitals in the North for its military purposes.

This report is totally based on political agenda. How can a report released based on an incident happened in the past be lenient with the change of governments when the incident is the same,” he asked.

He said it was the responsibility of the government to safeguard the security forces.

Former ambassador and academic Dr. Dayan Jayathilaka said this was the first time where a hybrid court has been proposed on a democratic and sovereign country in the world whereas such courts had been proposed on failed countries in the past.

He said such hybrid mechanism was in place when Sri Lanka was a British colony and that what had been agreed upon today was the same as that. (Ajith Siriwardana)