Lord Naseby, a controversial British politician who has been persistently criticised for his partiality for Sri Lanka has once again emerged to condemn the political aspirations of the Tamil people by denouncing efforts of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE) to remove the ban on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
On Wednesday 29th July, the TGTE made a request to the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission (POAC) to remove the ban on the LTTE. In response to this request, Naseby accused the TGTE of supporting the LTTE and stated that ‘‘The TGTE espouses an ideology which is almost identical to that of the LTTE’’ which had to be ‘challenged’, despite the TGTE specifying in their appeal to the Home secretary that the prohibition of the LTTE is often mistaken for the prohibition of Tamil advocacy for an independent state.
TGTE’s legal representative had drawn attention to MI5’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) at the POAC, confirming the cease of LTTE activities, and that the organisation didn’t have an established management configuration or converse with its associates.
Naseby has repeatedly minimized the number of civilian casualties at the end of Sri Lanka’s armed conflict, such as in January 2020 at the House of Lords where he claimed ‘about 6,000 people killed’ during the war and ‘of which a quarter are Tamil Tigers’, in spite of the UN announcing a minimum civilian casualty figure of 40,000.
Naseby also denies human rights abuses and torture in Sri Lanka. In January 2020 at the House of Lords he stated ‘There are complaints about torture. I have seen the ICRC three times and asked it whether it has seen torture in Sri Lanka. Every time, the answer has been clear: no. It is fake news’; something that has been contradicted by numerous international organisations over the years.
This week a joint statement was released by 11 International Human Rights Organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists, and CIVICUS cautioned the Sri Lankan government, demanding that they end targeted detention and the intimidation of lawyers, activists, human rights defenders and journalists in Sri Lanka, while highlighting numerous assaults on civil society actors, lawyers, journalists and NGOs in Sri Lanka.
Naseby is denounced for his blatant support for the Sri Lankan state, especially since it surfaced that he went to Sri Lanka 14 times between 2002 and 2017, including a one day trip in 2012 with a chartered helicopter ride with the Sri Lankan Air Force which had cost more than 1 billion Rupees.
