IANS
Colombo
Sri Lanka has agreed to be a part of an international convention to protect its citizens from enforced disappearances, cabinet spokesperson and minister Rajitha Senaratne said.
In a weekly media briefing, Senaratne said that on a proposal made by Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera, Sri Lanka had agreed to sign the ‘International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances’ and ratify it in Sri Lanka, Xinhua reported.
“This convention has defined enforced disappearance as a violation of human rights and considered it as a criminal offence and has made its member states to draft legislations based on these principles,” Senaratne said.
“So far 94 countries have signed the convention and 51 states have ratified it,” he added.
The minister said that the cabinet had agreed to sign and ratify the convention according to the mandate received by the new government.
Sri Lankan investigators have already launched investigations into thousands of people who have been missing during and after a 30-year civil war between government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels which ended in May 2009.
Some high-profile figures, including journalists have also disappeared during the previous Mahinda Rajapakse regime with the new government now vowing to probe the whereabouts of these people.
MASS GRAVE PROBE: Skeletal remains found at an alleged mass grave in the Tamil-dominated former war zone in Sri Lanka will be sent overseas for DNA tests, a lawyer said yesterday.
V S Niranjan, a lawyer at the magistrate’s court in Mannar, said that magistrate M Alexrajah issued the order on Saturday to send the remains of 88 skeletons found in 2013 at Thiruketheeswaran area.
The site of the mass grave is located in Mannar in Sri Lanka’s Tamil-dominated north, a former war zone. However, judicial medical officer Dananjaya Waidyaratne who had carried out the initial tests in 2013 after the discovery of the alleged mass grave, said there was no need to send them overseas and could be tested in Sri Lanka.
Police officials who carried out the investigations had told the court that the site was a graveyard previously and the remains found there could be of people who died under natural circumstances and buried there.
