Speaking at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York yesterday, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson stated there was a “systematic failure” in Sri Lanka, as a new action plan to prevent genocide and human rights abuses was launched.

Eliasson was speaking at the launch of “Rights Up Front”, a follow up report to the Internal Review Panel on UN Action in Sri Lanka, which concluded there was a “grave failure” on the part of the United Nations, and acknowledged that up to 70,000 Tamil civilians could have been killed.

The report was leaked by Inner City Press earlier this year (see here).

Saying there were three key elements to the new action plan, Eliasson stated that United Nations must make a “very serious effort to react more systematically when we see human rights violations that could risk turning into mass atrocities”.

He added,

“Well, if human rights violations is the beginning of something that can turn into mass atrocities and lead up to major operations on our side — political or peacekeeping — then you ask yourself, why shouldn’t we then be more firm and react at that stage when the human rights violations risk becoming mass atrocities?” 

“The second element is, of course, protection of civilians — we are talking about right now. Actually, protection of civilians becomes an issue when we fail to take the early warning signals on human rights as seriously as we should. Because, if we do not do it, then it turns out that you need protection of civilians when the fighting goes on and when the atrocities take place. So it’s actually the same job but on a later stage.  And we cannot promise, of course, that we will be able to stop all conflicts at that early stage — let us be realistic.”

“The third element is an internal issue which has to do with how we are organized and how are we prepared to deal with situations when they turn into the risk of becoming mass atrocities. Well then you have to make sure that we have the reporting, that we have the type of people who can do the work on the ground on human rights and on the political side.  And that, we came to the conclusion, as you may recall in the IRP [Internal Review Panel] Report on Sri Lanka, that we had a systemic failure of the UN system as a whole and that we need to show greater flexibility and come up with speedier action.”

Eliasson’s remarks come after he met with Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaksa in New York earlier this week, a man accused of orchestrating many of the alleged human rights violations.

When questioned on the meeting, and why the UN stayed silent in 2009 and in the face of ongoing human rights abuses on the island by Inner City Press, Elaisson responded,

“When it comes to what happened in the last phase of the horrible conflict in Sri Lanka in 2009, I want to refer to reports that were made at that time and to Charles Petrie’s report. When he talked about systemic failure, he meant not only the Secretariat, but also Member States. There was a responsibility not least from the Security Council’s side".

"And we decided to accept those observations on the failures; I will not go further into that because we saw as our major task to take this very seriously and to take it one step further and draw lessons from Sri Lanka, but also Rwanda reports, military reports of the past, and say “how can we be more concrete?” and really, make a serious attempt to make sure that we send a message to Member States that we now have to increase the level of attention on situations that will arise in the future, out of this frustration of saying “never again”". 

"Just the fact that you say “never again” and have done so a number of times shows that we have failed, we continue to fail. So actually, this is a pretty forward-looking… we haven’t spent more time than the earlier inquiries on what happened in Sri Lanka. We have said we accept those reports and then: “what can we do to make sure that we do it better if it happens again?””

See a video of the question below (from 22:06).

Earlier this week, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon also spoke on the “Rights Up Front” plan, stating,

“It is what we learned from the recent situation in Sri Lanka. As you know, I established a Panel of Experts and the Panel of Experts requested me to see whether the United Nations had done all… addressed properly. We had a very serious internal review. As a result of this we established this very important action plan."

"Of course, this Rights Up Front Action Plan is not aiming at any particular country or any particular case. This will be used for all countries and all cases, all situations. That is why I have submitted this to the General Assembly, with my strong recommendation. The President of the General Assembly has circulated to the Member States, so that this will be a sort of guideline to protect human rights, and prevent any further possible human rights violations in any cases. I am very firm. We discussed this matter even this morning among our senior advisers”.

See a video of the question below.