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A HUMAN RIGHTS group has filed a criminal complaint with Singapore’s attorney general to seek the arrest of Sri Lanka’s former president for alleged war crimes during his country’s civil war.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ousted from office over his country’s economic collapse and fled to Singapore earlier this month. He was defence secretary during Sri Lanka’s civil war, which ended in 2009.
The International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) – an evidence-gathering organisation administered by a South Africa-based non-profit foundation – said its lawyers filed the complaint requesting Rajapaksa’s immediate arrest.
The complaint alleges Rajapaksa committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions during the civil war “and that these are crimes subject to domestic prosecution in Singapore under universal jurisdiction”.
Sri Lanka’s economic crisis has left the nation’s 22 million people struggling with shortages of essentials, including medicine, fuel and food.
Months of protests have focused on the Rajapaksa political dynasty, which has ruled the country for most of the past two decades.
ITJP executive director Yasmin Sooka said: “The economic meltdown has seen the government collapse, but the crisis in Sri Lanka is really linked to structural impunity for serious international crimes going back three decades or more.
“This complaint recognises that it’s not just about corruption and economic mismanagement but also accountability for mass atrocity crimes.”
Sri Lanka’s civil war killed 100,000 people, according to conservative United Nations estimates. The actual number is believed to be much higher.
A report from a UN panel of experts said at least 40,000 ethnic minority Tamil civilians were killed in the final months of the fighting alone.
Tamil Tiger rebels fought to create an independent state for ethnic minority Tamils. The country’s ethnic Sinhala majority credited Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa with the war victory, cementing the family’s political dominance, though accounts of atrocities, autocratic governance and nepotism persisted.
Efforts to investigate allegations of war crimes were largely suppressed under Rajapaksa leaders.
After Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country earlier this month, parliamentarians elected former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to serve the remainder of his presidential term.
He declared a state of emergency with broad powers to act to ensure law and order, and a day after he was sworn in, hundreds of armed troops raided a protest camp outside the president’s office, attacking demonstrators with batons.
Rights groups have urged the president to immediately order troops and police to cease use of force and said Friday’s display seemed to follow a pattern of Sri Lankan authorities forcefully responding to dissent.
The political turmoil has threatened Sri Lanka’s potential for economic recovery. Wickremesinghe recently said bailout talks with the International Monetary Fund were nearing a conclusion.
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I don’t get from the article what the benefits of being a data hosting hub country are? Other than perhaps prestige and increased regulatory role.
Benefits of pharma and software tech multinationals are proven, with large numbers of high paying jobs.
Data centers aren’t big scale employers, additionally they are energy hungry industries that will not help our push to meet energy reduction targets.
The associated data science careers referred to in the article, arent typically located at the data centres, we could strive to excell in these disciplins without the data centres.
As a country we need to be discerning about the type of industry that we court. If it is to be huge banks of servers, we need to insist on zero emission environmentaly friendly facilities.
To be a global data hub we need data centers! Was it 2yrs later Apple finally gave up on planning for a 1billion investment in a data center in Galway a few years ago ? In the mean time a similar project started In Denmark was complete and operational. They are now proposing to build another in Denmark where they propose to provide unwanted heat to the local community.
Is this just a backup plan ?
The real challenge is hiring academics only, the US have a growing pool of criminals to cut deals with, good hackers either go to jail or work for the state. We don’t have criminals at that level here. Couple of good professionals in Cork but I am unsure where we can get the talent to really enforce the team behind these new task forces. We need people who can reverse engineer malware, are constantly updated on backdoors in circulation, along with 0day flaws and dissect packets, that’s before we even look at the problems with hardware from certain regions.
@Padraig Carey: *”enforce the team” = “harden the team”
It’s almost embarrassing to think the best in Irish tech management and government believe the data management companies like Amazon etc are here for anything other than cold weather cheap power and tax breaks
Perfect place for Data Hubs. Not to extreme weather patterns so cosy of electricity is not so high with cooling units and not really a chance of a earthquake or some other natural disaster.
Downside not great for climate change targets and don’t really employ many.
have your say