The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon released on Monday the much anticipated report by the independent expert panel he appointed last year to look into war crimes and crimes against humanity during the final phase in 2009 of Sri Lanka's war.

Reports on gender-based war crimes in Sri Lanka from Headlines Today, part of the India Today group:

On April 22, 2011: ‘Evidence of warcrimes in Sri Lanka’

“The publication of this report will cause irreparable damage to the reconciliation efforts of Sri Lanka. It will damage the UN system too.”

- G. L. Peiris, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister.

“The UN report says that the alleged crimes of both the warring parties and subsequent cover-up by the government constitutes ‘an assault on the entire system of international law and security’.

“By that, it means that should the government of Sri Lanka be allowed to get away with it, the system of international justice built on the back of the crimes in Rwanda and Bosnia is weakened.

This is the English text of the Sri Lankan government-sponsored petition against the UN expert panel's report:

“We Sri Lankans consisting of Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim communities who enjoy the newly earned freedom, hereby strongly denounce the comments and relevant discussions made against the independence of our country by the UN’s Committee on war crimes allegations.”

Based on leaked extracts, the UN expert panel’s report on Sri Lanka constitutes a watershed moment in international understanding of the crimes committed in the closing phase of the war in Sri Lanka.

Crucially, although the word does not appear in the extracts, the report’s contents well supports the charge that Sri Lanka engaged in genocide of the Tamils. The report lays out in detail the calculated, deliberate and systematic targeting of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan armed forces, operating under the direct command of the country’s top political leadership.

The former UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka, Gordon Weiss, has aptly termed the publishing of the UN experts’ report as a ‘Srebrenica’ moment for Sri Lanka and indeed for the world.

The analogy is correct on many counts. Firstly, it was in relation to Srebrenica that the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) most clearly formulated the principle that part destruction – specifically, a geographically contained (i.e a small territory) destruction - of an ethnic or national group constituted genocide.

Following the UN expert panel's submission of its report on Sri Lanka to the Secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, the British Tamils Forum (BTF), an umbrella group of Tamil community organisations, said Wednesday:

"We demand that an independent international investigation is conducted, supported by comprehensive witness protection afforded to the Tamil community by a UN task force.

King's College London (KCL) Tamil Society's raises funds for the Sivan Arul Ilam Charity in Mannar. See the video created by Ratheeson Thillainathan for the Society:

These are comments by Amnesty International’s Sri Lanka researcher, Yolanda Foster, in an interview to Channel 4 News Saturday.

“[The UN panel’s] report is a call for action because it highlights the scale and gravity of what happened in the final months of the war in Sri Lanka.

“Amnesty believes an international independent investigation should be set up without further delay.