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UN rapporteur accuses BBS in report

Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Ms Rita IzsákThe UN special rapporteur on minority issues, Ms Rita Izsák, has accused the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) of igniting tensions and contributing to more than 350 violent attacks against Muslims and over 150 attacks against Christians in the past two years.

In a report to the 7th session of the Forum on Minorities Issues in Geneva which meets for two days beginning today, Izsák said that the BBS along with other groups, are promoting extremist views, proclaiming the racial superiority of Sinhala Buddhists and spreading fear among the population by, for example, alleging that statues of Buddha are being bulldozed by religious minorities or that evangelical Christians are forcibly converting vulnerable people.

In her report Rita Izsák noted that on 2 July 2014, she, along with other United Nations experts, called on Sri Lanka to adopt urgent measures to stop the racial and faith-based hatred and violence directed at Muslim and Christian communities by Buddhist groups with extremist views, and to bring perpetrators to justice.

She also notes in her report that in conflicts in Afghanistan, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Somalia, Sri Lanka and the Sudan, minority women have suffered systematic sexual and other violence.

“Violence against minority women does not always take place in the context of conflict. Women affected by caste-based discrimination in several countries experience high levels of violence owing to their low caste status and gender, and face killing, rape, gang rape and custodial torture,” she said.

The UN special rapporteur also recalls that in Sri Lanka, the United Nations development and humanitarian branches were unable to fully address the United Nations political and human rights priorities.

Failures identified included a United Nations system that lacked an adequate and shared sense of responsibility for human rights violations; an incoherent internal United Nations crisis-management structure which failed to conceive and executer a coherent strategy in response to early warnings and subsequent human rights and humanitarian law violations against civilians; the ineffective dispersal of United Nations Headquarters structures to coordinate United Nations action and to address international human rights and humanitarian law violations across several different United Nations Headquarters entities in Geneva and New York; a model for United Nations action in the field that was designed for a development rather than a conflict response; and inadequate political support from Member States as a whole. (Colombo Gazette)


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