UN Special Envoy for IDP Arrives in Sri Lanka

(December, 13, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The representative of the UN Secretary General on the human rights of internally displaced people and refugees, Mr. Walter Kalin, is to arrive in Colombo today (Thursday) on a week long official tour to Sri Lanka.

He is scheduled to meet wide range of people through out Sri Lanka including government leaders, representatives of human rights institutions and political parties during his stay in Colombo.

He will be submitting his finding to the Human Rights Council, UN sources in Colombo said.

Mr. Walter Kälin is a Swiss legal scholar and professor of constitutional and international law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bern.

Mr. Kälin has been closely concerned with issues of IDPs for over a decade, having served as chair of the committee of legal experts that developed the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and having authored numerous books on the subject, including the Annotations to the Guiding Principles (American Society of International Law, Brookings-SAIS Project on Internal Displacement, 2000).

In addition to his responsibilities as Representative, Mr. Kälin is also currently a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee (since 2003). From 1991-1992, Kälin served as the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the situation of human rights in Kuwait under Iraqi Occupation.

This year alone, many UN dignitaries were visited Sri Lanka officially to assess the worsening human rights situations in the country including Ms. Loiuse Arbour, the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Sri Lanka’s rights situation heavily criticized by the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour on Tuesday in the current 6th session of Human Rights Council (2nd part) in UN.

The civil war in Sri Lanka has so far claimed at least 80,000 people while half a million people are internally displaced and over a million people are externally displaced. At least 5,800 people have been killed, over thousands were abducted and hundreds are missing in the last two years alone.