Human Rights In North East Sri Lanka

EDM number 830 in 1998-99, proposed by Edward Davey on 14/07/1999.

That this House views with great concern the official and unofficial embargoes on food and medicine to the Vanni and other Tamil areas in the north east of Sri Lanka which are causing enormous suffering, starvation and deaths in the civilian population; notes the lack of free flow of information in and out of these areas, including the ban on visits by the media, NGOs and human rights monitors to the Vanni; further notes the massacres, torture, extra-judicial killings, 'disappearances' and displacement of the Tamil people reported in the findings of the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations, and the existence of mass graves identified at Chemmani and the Duraigappah Football Stadium in the North as reported by Amnesty International and in the eastern province as reported by Joseph Parajasingham, Member of Parliament for Batticaloa; calls on Her Majesty's Government to intervene urgently with the Government of Sri Lanka to seek an immediate end to the embargoes on food and medicine to the affected areas, to secure an agreement to allow the international community to delivery humanitarian aid to the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Tamils without any hindrance from the Sri Lankan security forces and to request an independent and impartial monitoring of the human rights and humanitarian situation, including an investigation with international experts into the mass graves at Chemmani, Ariyalai, Poompuhar and other areas in the Tamil homeland; and urges the International War Crimes Tribunal to investigate the situation in Sri Lanka.

This motion has been signed by a total of 36 MPs.