Sri Lanka’s foreign minister said that an American diplomat who had reportedly refused to take a coronavirus test on arrival at Colombo’s international airport, returned to subsequently be tested and that “action” had been taken against those who let him leave the airport without being tested.
Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena said the diplomat had been allowed to evade testing procedures “due to an unclarified clause related to diplomatic privileges,” according to Economy Next.
The US Embassy in Sri Lanka tweeted that “diplomatic staff adhere carefully to Sri Lankan COVID-19 guidelines, including quarantine restrictions, in close coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Relations”.
“The arrival of U.S. diplomatic staff to Sri Lanka also complies with the norms and procedures outlined in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, just as it applies to arrival of Sri Lankan and other diplomatic staff to the United States,” it added.
Gunawardena reportedly told journalists later that the diplomat had returned to be tested and that “actions had been taken regarding the airport officials who had let the US diplomat exit the airport without the PCR testing”.
“So if there had been some hesitation to the word ‘Diplomat’ when we clearly had the ability to do the test, now it has been completely corrected,” he said. “No Diplomatic officer had the ability to evade the testing.”
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