{"id":64763,"date":"2017-03-31T14:43:04","date_gmt":"2017-03-31T21:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=64763"},"modified":"2017-03-31T14:43:22","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T21:43:22","slug":"mr-claims-obama-admin-pressured-ban-ki-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/03\/31\/mr-claims-obama-admin-pressured-ban-ki-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"MR claims Obama admin pressured Ban Ki-moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtesy\u00a0Ceylon Today<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa blamed the Obama administration for pressuring UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to take decisions on Sri Lanka against UN protocols.<\/p>\n

In a press communiqu\u00e9 released yesterday, he noted that the UN Secretary General can appoint a panel of experts to advise him on a country only on the instructions of the UN Security Council. He went on to note that under pressure from the Obama administration, Ban Ki-moon appointed a panel of experts to advice him about Sri Lanka without the sanction of the Security Council,……thus going against the practices in the UN that had evolved over seven decades. The investigation against Sri Lanka by the OHCHR, which began in 2014, had similar issues of legitimacy, he said.<\/p>\n

When the UNHRC appoints a Commission of Inquiry to go into the situation in a country, the members of the Commission are appointed by the President of the UNHRC, who is the ambassador of a member nation, Rajapaksa explained in the press communiqu\u00e9. But in the case of Sri Lanka the inquiry panel was appointed by the UN Human Rights Commissioner \u2013 a second tier UN official, not by the President of the UNHRC, he said.<\/p>\n

“Thus this report of the OHCHR, which the yahapalana government has accepted, is not the report of a properly constituted UNHCR Commission of Inquiry. Moreover the UNHRC itself passes resolutions each year (with a two thirds majority) against the OHCHR accusing it of being overly dependent on Western countries for funding and having too many Westerners on its staff.<\/p>\n

Thus, the present government has accepted the report of an inquiry carried out by a body regularly accused of bias by the UNHRC itself. In order to meet the allegations being made against our Armed Forces, by various interested parties, my government commissioned six of the world’s foremost experts in the law of armed conflict, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, Desmond de Silva QC, Rodney Dixon QC, Professor David M. Crane, Prof. Michael Newton and Maj. Gen. John Holmes to provide us with written opinions about the allegations and purported evidence against Sri Lanka,” the press communiqu\u00e9 stated.<\/p>\n

He further noted that all six experts wrote well reasoned analyses declaring unequivocally that no violations of the law of armed conflict had taken place in Sri Lanka, and added that the Rajapaksa Government wanted to table these six reports before the UNHRC but it was voted out of power in January 2015. The new government deliberately suppressed all these documents, he said.<\/p>\n

“After suppressing these written opinions of international experts, which were all in Sri Lanka’s favour, the yahapalana government accepted, without a murmur, the OHCHR report on Sri Lanka which accused us of committing every war crime imaginable. Now, they have through two co-sponsored resolutions in the UNHRC, agreed to implement the recommendations in that biased and tainted report. This is the extent of the outright treachery practiced by the yahapalana government against its own Armed Forces and people,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Courtesy\u00a0Ceylon Today Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa blamed the Obama administration for pressuring UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to take decisions on Sri Lanka against UN protocols. In a press communiqu\u00e9 released yesterday, he noted that the UN Secretary General can appoint a panel of experts to advise him on a country only on the instructions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}