As a UN torture prevention body touches down in Sri Lanka, we look at the island nation’s history of human rights abuses
More than 50 men from the ethnic Tamil minority seeking political asylum in Europe say they were abducted and tortured under Sri Lanka’s current government in accounts that conjure images of the country’s bloody civil war that ended in 2009.
During the visit, the members of UN's Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment are due to meet with the island’s human rights commission as well as civil society organisations. Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war came to a bloody end in 2009 when Sri Lankan troops defeated separatist Tamil Tiger militants who fought for an independent homeland for ethnic minority Tamils.
documented “forced recruitment, abusive forced labour, and restrictions on movement that place their lives at risk” by the LTTE., squads in the eponymous white vans that abducted individuals - either from their homes or the street - to deposit them in an undisclosed location, torture them and then consign them to the streets either dead or alive. The notorious Joseph Camp, a military camp in the island’s north, was allegedly the site of torture, detention and sexual violence.
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