Sri Lanka guilty

*expulsion of the victims from their homes

*seizures of private lands

*declaring vast areas as military High Security Zones (HSZ) to facilitate the military acquisition of Tamil land

The Tribunal undertook to further examine allegations of forced sterilization and contraception of Tamil women.

The UK and USA were found to be guilty of complicity in the crime of genocide, including complicity by procuring means, such as weapons, instruments or any other means, used to commit genocide, with the accomplice knowing that such means would be used for such a purpose; and complicity by knowingly aiding or abetting a perpetrator of a genocide in the planning or enabling of such acts.

The Tribunal recognised that Sri Lanka did not have the capacity to achieve genocide without assistance and on the basis of evidence provided came to the conclusion that the UK, USA and possibly India are guilty of complicity. However due to the constraint of time the Tribunal limited its findings to the UK and the USA pending the availability of further evidence against India and other States not yet identified.

After the recent gift of two patrol boats to the Sri Lankan Navy, Australia is in danger of being one of those countries. The gift adds to the military capacity of the Rajapaksa regime to illegally detain and harm Tamil asylum seekers fleeing the repression noted above.

In recent times the Rudd and Abbott governments took it upon themselves to send Tamil asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka without hearing their claims. This was done on the basis that they were economic refugees - although how this determination was reached without first hearing claims is not explained. This illegal undertaking is now even more insidious given the findings of the Tribunal.

Australians, outside of government, involved with the welfare of Tamil asylum seekers have long known of the genocidal intent of the Sri Lanka government. However it has been somewhat of a puzzle why the Australian government was not informed of this by the Australian High Commission (AHC) in Colombo.

I took the opportunity at the hearings to ask some of the Tamil witnesses from within the country whether they thought the AHC was informed and they said yes on the basis that they had briefed Australian diplomatic officers. This raises the question of what is done with that information and the assumption must be that it has gone to Canberra and been ignored by government for reasons of policy and politics. This would suggest that both major parties knowingly acted illegally with respect to processing Tamil asylum seekers. How low can we go?

Lower it seems. I was also informed that the AHC has now ceased briefings from Tamil sources in the north, presumably on the basis of what they don't know they don't have to lie about. A form of deniability adopted and refined by Hitler's Third Reich toward the final solution of the Jewish question.

The Tribunal requested that states able to do so should take Tamil asylum seekers as refugees.