A leaked draft of an UN internal report on Sri Lanka concludes that "events in Sri Lanka mark a grave failure of the UN", reports the BBC.

The report, headed by former senior UN official Charles Petrie, points to a “systemic failure” and questions decisions such as the withdrawal of UN staff from the war zone in September 2008, after warning from the Sri Lankan government that it could no longer guarantee their safety.

One member of the UN team that left, Benjamin Dix, claimed to have disagreed with the pull-out, saying:

"I believe we should have gone further north, not evacuate south, and basically abandon the civilian population with no protection or witness. As a humanitarian worker, questions were running through my mind 'what is this all about? Isn't this what we signed up to do?'"

The report says that the situation on the ground was “catastrophic” and points out that:

"many senior UN staff did not perceive the prevention of killing of civilians as their responsibility - and agency and department heads at UNHQ were not instructing them otherwise," going on to describe "a sustained and institutionalised reluctance" among UN personnel in Sri Lanka "to stand up for the rights of people they were mandated to assist".

The Tamil National Alliance's MP V. Saravanapavan, questioned the silence of India over increasing calls to abolish the 13th Amendment, reports the Daily Mirror and the Island.

Speaking at the second reading of the budget, MP Saravanapavan is to have said,

A call by ITN Productions for graduate film students to create an original short film based on the production company's original documentary - Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, has produced a striking result.

Cristina Picchi, a 30 year old filmmaker in London, has created a moving short film, that captures the responses of five people as they watch Sri Lanka's Killing Fields.

Speaking to Channel 4 news, Picchi said,

"When asked to edit a video using the film's footage I felt overwhelmed: everything seemed so important yet, when de-contextualised from the original narrative, so horrific and unnecessarily graphic. I then decided to take a different approach.

A Sri Lankan man has been arrested by French police on suspicion of the murder of Mathinthiran Nadarajah, alias Col Parithi, reported Le Parisien on Monday.

“What many tourists do not know is that the new peace in Sri Lanka has come at a high cost to freedom of expression and the human rights of citizens. The country is now rated the fourth most dangerous place in the world for journalists, higher even than Afghanistan. More than fifteen journalists are believed to have been killed since 2006.”

“At the end of the war 300000 civilians were illegally detained in inhumane conditions likened to concentration camps. According to a United Nations panel “The Government subjected victims and survivors of the conflict to further deprivation.. some of who were separated were summarily executed and some of the women may have been raped..”

Sri Lanka’s Minister of Agriculture, JHU front-liner Udaya Gammanpila has said that he believes Sri Lanka was able to successfully counter human rights abuse allegations at the UN Human Rights Council.

Calling the allegations “baseless theories put forward by separatist forces” in an interview with the Sunday Observer, Gammanpila explained how the Sri Lankan delegation at the UPR was able to defy them by detailing Sri Lanka’s extensive post-2009 ‘achievements’ in rehabilitation and infrastructure. Gammanpila then went on to talk about the Tamil issue, claiming that a solution can only be formed by the Sri Lankan government.

The Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was in China today, meeting his counterpart, Defence Minister Liang Guanglie.

Meeting in Beijing, the pair discussed means of boosting relations between the two countries and militaries, reported China's Xinhua news agency.

The UNP has said that the violence in Welikada prison ended with security forces committing a massacre.
Mangala Samaraweera of the party said that most of the dead were gunned down by police and the army.

"It's a massacre that has to be condemned. It shows the breakdown of the rule of law in the country," he said, according to Reuters.

Photograph TamilNet

Tamil diaspora organisations have been voicing shock at the death of French TCC (Tamil Coordination Committee) co-ordinator and ex-LTTE commander, Colonel Parithi, who was shot dead in Paris on Thursday night.

50-year-old Nadarajah Mathinthiran, more commonly known by his noms de guerre Reagan and later Parithi, left the LTTE in the early 90s and took responsibility for mobilising the French Tamil diaspora in the early 2000s. Mathinthiran had been targeted in police crackdowns on LTTE fundraising activities in 2007 and had served a three year prison term until 2010.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has called for changes to the country’s 13th Amendment, calling for a mechanism that will unify the country further.

Delivering his budget speech in Parliament, Rajapaksa stated the devolution should not lead to separation, saying,