Although the duties, responsibilities and rights of people were codified during the reigns of ancient Emperors such as the King of Ur (2050B.C.), Hammurabi in Mesopotamia (1780 B.C.), Cyrus the Great (6th Century B.C.) in Persia, and Asoka the Great (265B.C.) in India, it was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that thinkers such as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and others in the US and France came to realize that human rights should be considered part of natural law.   Despite this, it was only after the world witnessed the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust during World War II that the world community acted with frenzied urgency to enshrine certain rights that arise from the fact of being human, and to proclaim and adopt such rights as a common standard for aspiration by all Peoples and all Nations of the world.   This commitment resulted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948. Read More...

The main impulse for this paper is Tissa Jayatilaka’s essay titled ‘G L Pieris, Jayantha Dhanapala and R2P’ (The Island, 5 December 2007) in which there is an endorsement cum elaboration of what Gareth Evans said at the ‘Neelan Thiruchelvam Memorial Lecture’ in July this year on the emerging concept of ‘R2P’ (‘responsibility to protect’ human rights – an acronym to make it sound like a mysterious manthram?), and a refutation of the reservations which G L Pieris has expressed about the possible pitfalls of converting the concept to a concrete course of action pursued in the name of safeguarding human rights. Read more : The Other Side of R2P

The post-election phase is developing into a more bizarre scene than anything that happened in the east. Actually, the elections took place under more reasonable conditions without any of the hysteria that is driving the opposition, the NGOs, the diplomats and pro-UNP media round the bend. To their astonishment, the Asian Election monitors commended the electoral process and praised the voters who participated in it. But this was not music to the ears of the anti-national Jeremiahs.  Read more...

The formidable new axis powers fighting for lebensraum, calling themselves the international community (IC) is having nightmares. Osama and Al Zawahri are threatening to ratchet up their holy war and threatening to send them all to hell.  But what gives them unending nightmares is that Obama, a Black may become the next President of the USA. That will make many white eyes either don the suicide jacket (Louise A has already got her first fit on) which revolted them before or scramble up steeples to P. Read More...

As you are well aware the threat – internal and external - to the survival of our beloved nation assumes many forms, the latest and perhaps the most ominous taking the guise of “humanitarian intervention” through the emerging doctrine of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P). Read more....

Human rights & the dignity of life are some of the colorful words that make up western rhetoric. It was the US’s desire to liberate the Iraqi’s from the Stalin of modern times – Saddam Hussein & his weapons of mass destruction that urged 2 US Governments to enter Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction but Saddam was captured & later executed but for the “freed” Iraqi’s their “freedom” was far from over. Read more...

The proliferation of UN-sanctioned interventions in ‘internal conflicts’ since the late 1980s though facilitated largely by the concurrent easing of super-power rivalry, was also an outcome of a distinct trend of increasing global concern on protection and promotion of human rights in the context of the contemporary tide of revulsion against genocidal atrocities in conflict situations such as those of Somalia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Kosovo. Read more....

There are internal and external threats to the survival of Sri Lanka.   Such threats assume many forms. The latest and perhaps the most ominous one takes the guise of “humanitarian intervention” through the emerging doctrine of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P). Read more....

When a law has been violated it is not unusual for the party accused of such serious offence who has no credible defence, to seek refuge in some form of “special pleading” in exculpation or mitigation. The United States Government and its NATO allies acting in collusion, who must take full responsibility for the several violations of International Law and the Charter involved in Kosovo’s UDI... Read more...

United Nations Organization (UNO) was formed after the Second World War by member nations among other things to ensure that a militarily powerful nation will never be able to threaten the sovereignty and territorial integrity of another member nation. However this very basic intention of the UNO has been made to stand on its head after many western nations recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence. Read more....

In the past few weeks there have been many media reports that point to the prevalence of confusion and disarray among the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE/Tigers) in the face of heavy losses inflicted by the armed forces of the government of Sri Lanka. Apart from many references to injury sustained by the Tiger leader Prabhakaran in the course of an aerial bombardment last November, there are a few speculations according to which he could even be dead. Read more....

The versions of what transpired at the recent meeting between representatives of the House of Lords and the House of Commons and a delegation of the ‘British Tamil Forum’ (BTF) as reported in the press (including several websites that carry news on Sri Lanka), though varied in content and focus, could be summarised as follows:  Read more...

The hope and expectation that the UN Charter would provide an effective answer to the use of aggressive force and unlawful interventions in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and be an acceptable instrument in the management of international conflicts, was not realized and may be described, in the words of Antonio Cassese  as   “the end of a magnificent illusion”. Read more...

Referring to Kosovo’s declaration of independence on February 17, 2008, Roger Cohen in his column to The New York Times of February 21, 2008, titled "A Change to Believe In" stated: "….(Kosovo) is in effect the first major fruit of the ideas behind R2P" (Responsibility to Protect). Read more...

“We will adhere hundred percent to the CFA. We plead for the continuation of that agreement’. This statement was issued by Nadesan the current political head of the LTTE. ‘Sri Lanka’s unilateral abrogation of the CFA will only add to the violence and the terrorist activities’ Eric Solheim made the above statement soon after. Read more...

In the Neelan Tiruchlevam Memorial Lecture delivered at the ICES in July last year, Gareth Evans, the President of the International Crisis Group, in focusing on the limits of State Sovereignty in relation to the Responsibility of the State to Protect its People (R2P) considered it opportune to warn the audience that recent events in Sri Lanka made foreign intervention a live possibility. Read more...

The ‘ Kingdom of Yugoslavia’ came into being as a nation-state at the conclusion of the First World War in 1918. Carved out as it was from the former Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it brought together within a sovereign nation-state, several disparate nationalities inhabiting parts of the Balkan peninsula and the Danube basin. Read more...