At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

[muriel_volestrangler]

Mauritius Prime Minister to boycott CHOGM in Colombo, joins Canada and India

War crime allegations dominate 'extraordinary' CHOGM in Sri Lanka

"Does anyone specifically have a question that's not on Sri Lanka or human rights?" the media spokesman for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting implored journalists at a press conference held by host president Mahinda Rajapaksa.
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There is mounting evidence the methods Mr Rajapaksa's army used to end Sri Lanka's 25-year-old civil war in 2009 may amount to war crimes: The shelling of "no fire" zones inhabited by civilians, and reports systemic rape and torture were used to demoralise the Tamil Tiger insurgency.
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But British prime minister David Cameron broke ranks to observe, "we do that not by gliding over the difficult issues, the human rights issues, journalistic freedom issues, reconciliation".
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Upon his return to Colombo Mr Cameron spoke powerfully of his meeting with Tamil journalists subject to official harassment and the accounts he heard of disappeared members of the Jaffna community.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/19881411/war-crime-allegations-dominate-extraordinary-chogm-in-sri-lanka/

The problem is that Rajapaksa, for all his eagerness to seize the Commonwealth’s helm, has spent years undermining those values and principles. Though democratically elected, he has relied on his popular mandate to sidestep or get rid of all the safeguards that ordinarily stop democrats from turning into demagogues. Soon after winning his second presidential term, he abolished a law that would have prevented him standing for a third; two of his brothers, Basil and Gotabaya, head powerful ministries, while another one, Chamal, has become the speaker of parliament. His government refuses to acknowledge, let alone investigate, allegations of serious official misconduct: the claim, for example, that the Defence Ministry, run by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, bundles away – ‘white-vans’ – those it perceives as opponents in unmarked white vehicles. There is compelling evidence that tens of thousands of civilians died during the army’s final onslaught against the Tigers; and according to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Sri Lanka has more citizens who have vanished without trace than any other country except Iraq. Free expression has suffered as much as all this suggests, with at least 22 outspoken journalists killed over the last seven years, all of them murdered by unidentified persons who remain at large. And the situation is not improving. The UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay reported last August that ‘surveillance and harassment appears to be getting worse… Critical voices are quite often attacked or even permanently silenced.’

That state of affairs sits uneasily with the aspirations set out in the Commonwealth Charter. It oughtn’t to be a surprise, therefore, that the organisation’s secretary-general, Kamalesh Sharma, showed some concern after Rajapaksa made his boldest power-grab yet at the beginning of the year, removing the country’s most senior judge, Shirani Bandaranayake, when she ruled against a law that gave the minister of economic development, Basil Rajapaksa, control of a fund containing 80 billion rupees (roughly £380 million) of public revenue. The proposed fund would have been exempt from parliamentary controls on spending, and the uses to which it was put would have been covered by official secrecy laws: anyone who disclosed how the moneys were spent would have been exposed to criminal charges. Chamal Rajapaksa, the parliamentary speaker, duly arranged for the troublesome chief justice to be impeached.

The move against Bandaranayake clearly boded ill for good governance and the separation of powers, but the steps taken by Secretary-General Sharma have cast their own baleful shadow over the CHOGM. Sharma, who is not himself legally trained, began by inviting two senior jurists to tell him whether removal of the chief justice was consistent with Commonwealth values and principles. Their responses were unequivocal. Jeffrey Jowell, a QC who directs the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, found that the chief justice had been ousted by an unfair process that ‘did not comply with … Commonwealth values and principles’. The second lawyer Sharma consulted, the late Pius Langa, a former chief justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, was even more forthright. Sri Lanka’s government, he concluded, had not merely contravened Commonwealth values and principles: it was ‘sowing the seeds of anarchy’ and ‘directly violating the rule of law’.
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Discretion is no longer an option, however: the text of both legal opinions has leaked, which in itself reveals something about the secretary-general’s effectiveness. If his claim of confidentiality is to stand up, there needs to be evidence that he is protecting or repairing Sri Lanka’s decapitated Supreme Court – and there is none. All that Sharma’s office even claims to have done to safeguard judicial independence is to have provided the government with ‘a compendium of Commonwealth practice’ and ‘technical assistance to make the necessary changes’. Whatever that might have involved (which seems to be another secret), it has had no tangible effects. Bandaranayake was summoned to court in mid-September on charges that would be laughable if they weren’t so vindictive: her failure to disclose empty bank accounts, it is alleged, amounts to the corrupt concealment of valuable assets. The pliant figure that Rajapaksa chose to succeed her, Mohan Peiris, a former attorney-general and cabinet adviser, is meanwhile supervising Supreme Court judges who are soon going to be asked to rubber-stamp Bandaranayake’s removal and his appointment. If, as looks likely, some of the judges prefer instead to retire, the president will get to pick their successors, at which point the last significant obstacle to executive domination will disappear.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n22/sadakat-kadri/at-the-chogm