UNITED NATIONS: The UN chief has appointed a three-member panel headed by a former Indonesian attorney general to look into alleged rights abuses committed during Sri Lanka's quarter-century civil war.
The panel is to be chaired by Marzuki Darusman, also the UN's special rights investigator to North Korea, the United Nations said Tuesday.
Its job is to advise Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on alleged violations of international rights and humanitarian laws during the war's final stages. Videos, photographs and satellite images presented by human rights groups as evidence of war crimes have been rejected as forgeries by Colombo.
The other two members are Yasmin Sooka, a South African who had been a member of the commission that investigated apartheid atrocities, and Steven Ratner, an American lawyer and author of a book on the struggle among nations to hold people accountable for human rights abuses.
The panel aims to get cooperation from Sri Lankan officials and complete its advisory work within four months.
