New Delhi, Mar 19 : A group of lawyers protested in Delhi today and demanded from the Indian government to support the UN resolution on war crimes against Sri Lanka.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is under fire from the U.N. Human Rights Council, which last year adopted a United States-sponsored resolution demanding that Sri Lanka ensure government troops who committed war crimes during the final stages of its war against Tamil rebels are brought to justice.
P V Yogeshwaran, a lawyer urged Indian government to declare Rajapaksa ‘a war criminal'.
“We want India to strongly support the UN resolution moved by America without diluting it and to declare Rajapaksa as a genocide and a war criminal and he has to be tried before the International Court of Justice,” said Yogeshwaran.
Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in 2009, in the final months of a war that began in 1983, a U.N. panel said, as government troops advanced on the last stronghold of the rebels fighting for an independent homeland.
The U.N. panel said it had “credible allegations” that Sri Lankan troops and the Tamil Tigers both carried out atrocities and war crimes, and singled out the government for most of the responsibility for the deaths.
Sri Lanka has come under international pressure to bring to book those accused of war crimes and boost efforts to reconcile a polarized country.
A UN report last year cited an earlier estimate of 40,000 civilians killed in crossfire between government and rebel forces after they were trapped on a sliver of coastline, and cited credible information that over 70,000 remained ‘unaccounted for'.
The UN report has reinvigorated calls from human rights groups and expatriate ethnic Tamils for an international probe into suspected war crimes towards the end of the conflict with the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam).
