Sri Lanka will stop importing oil from Iran at the end of March, ahead of the US sanctions deadline of June 29, the island’s Sunday Times newspaper said.

Sri Lanka has depended almost entirely on Iran for its crude oil supplies, getting 93 percent from there.

What is India’s ambition in Sri Lanka?

According to the Sunday Times editorial today, “to carve out a powerful autonomous Northern Province which it can use as its base on Sri Lankan soil through its proxy - the Tamil National Alliance.”

"Once again, Channel 4 has brought to international attention important and disturbing evidence to support allegations of grave abuses in Sri Lanka."

"It's a bit of a tricky one. All round us, we see atrocities taking place all over the world and in war a lot of unsavoury things happen on both sides. I personally think the political issues are best dealt with by the politicians and administrators."

"But that doesn't mean we should stick our heads in the sand. If the government feel there is cases to answer to a great enough extent that the England team shouldn't be touring somewhere then that is a call they need to make. Until that is the case, it would be wrong for us to focus on anything other than the cricket."

"You must be careful that if you are investigating anything, you investigate it very thoroughly because otherwise there's nothing worse than a little bit of knowledge.

“I think it’s something that you keep an eye out for when you see it in the news... But ultimately there are people that are paid to look into these things, and they’re mainly in the government. They need to do their job and we need to do ours. ”

A spokeperson for the international human rights organisation, Human Rights Watch, expressed confusion and disbelief at the Sri Lankan government's indignant opposition to the resolution tabled at the 19th session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Sri Lanka's High Commissioner, Kariyawasam, to India apologised on Friday after suggesting that any Tamil Nadu MPs who spoke of accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity had been lobbied by the LTTE and should be investigated by Indian authorities.

In reports published Friday, the International Crisis Group detailed and condemned the "deepening militarisation" and "Sinhalisation" in the Tamil area of the Northen Province, that the report concludes are part of a strategy to ""change the facts of the ground", as has already happened in the east, and make it impossible to claim the north as a Tamil-majority area deserving of self-governance."

In a statement released Wednesday, the TNA condemned the Sri Lankan government's catalogue of broken promises of political settlement and human rights, urging the member states of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to act.

See here for full statement.

Extracts reproduced in full below:

"The Sri Lankan government has persistently claimed that, if provided time and space, it will evolve homegrown processes that will address the need for a political solution, improvement in human rights and accountability. This claim must be evaluated against the chronic unwillingness of the government to honour its own commitments to the people of Sri Lanka and the international community. Some of these commitments have been repeated for many years, with no progress made on the ground."

"Moreover, the trajectory of the government’s conduct indicates that, if given time and space, that time and space will be utilized to pursue the agenda that the government has brazenly undertaken despite assurances to the contrary. That agenda entails the silencing of the democratic voice of the Tamil people, the entrenching of power at the centre and the transformation of the linguistic, cultural and religious composition of the North and East so as to negate the need for a political solution."