Sri Lanka to withdraw from UN rights resolution

Sri Lanka’s prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa said that the country was withdrawing from a United Nations resolution investigating alleged war crimes.
The announcement comes days after the US imposed a travel ban on Sri Lanka’s army commander, Shavendra Silva over alleged human rights violations in the 2009 civil war.
Rajapaksa was president in 2009 when the country’s troops defeated Tamil Tiger rebels, who were fighting for a separate homeland for the Tamil minority. However, rights groups accused the army of killing at least 40,000 civilians in the conflict.
The 2015 resolution calls for accountability for crimes carried out by Sri Lankan troops and reparations for victims. Sri Lanka co-sponsored the resolution at the UN Human Rights Council along with 11 other countries calling for the investigation alleged war crimes by both government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels.
“It is because of the historic betrayal in co-sponsoring UN Human Rights Council Resolution 30/1 in 2015 that other countries are able to name members of our armed forces as violators of human rights”, Rajapaksa said.
According to a 2015 UN report, commander Silva had been tasked with freeing one of the last strongholds of the rebels. The report finds that the army unit he was leading shelled a hospital and a UN hub. Silva has denied the allegations , saying that the facility was being used to treat rebel fighters.