Philip Dissanayake, Executive Director of the Right to Life Human Rights Center, says that protecting rights is essential for doing business with the international community and that it is not possible to do business today without respecting human rights.
He says torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings are the most serious human rights abuses, not only in the police but also in government institutions, including prisons. He said that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had called for the immediate launch of an independent inquiry into human rights abuses in a country where humanitarian violence has become a normalcy, and that this was a challenge to the rule of law in our country.
During the late ‘yahapalana’ government , 11 independent commissions were appointed by the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, and at that time these human rights violations were reduced due to the attention of those commissions.
However, the present government has turned these commissions into nominal commissions through the 20th amendment to the constitution, he said.
He also said that the resolutions against Sri Lanka at the Geneva 46 session were passed by a majority of countries which favourable to Sri Lanka because we are on a separate journey (military), apart from international community and therefore the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has been assigned to prepare a report on Sri Lanka by next September. .
“These reports are often challenging for Sri Lanka and our country will have to face many problems in the future, and the European Parliament is already deciding to deprive us of GSP +,” he said.
He recalled that the concession we received in 2005 was lost in 2010 due to human rights violations during the civil war and that we were able to regain this concession two years after the appointment of the ‘Yahapalana Government’ in 2015 (2017).
He further said that we are going to lose this concession again due to human rights violations taking place in the country and therefore it cannot be succeed in international business without protecting rights at present.
-Shani-