UK Foreign Office under fire for allowing Lanka to host CHOGM

Friday, 18 October 2013 00:05 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office has come in for major criticism by members of the UK’s House of Commons, who have called the Government’s position on allowing Sri Lanka to host CHOGM 2013 ‘timid and inconsistent’. In a new report on Sri Lanka’s human rights situation released yesterday, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons said there was “scant evidence” of progress in political and human rights in Sri Lanka. The damning report also includes a critical analysis of the UK Foreign Office’s role in allowing Sri Lanka’s bid for 2013 CHOGM host to go through. Britain should have taken a more principled and robust stand, the FAC report said.

“What concerns us now is how the Government has come to find itself in this position, and whether the FCO played its hand poorly, both in the discussions which led to the decision that Sri Lanka would be the hosts in 2013,” the Foreign Affairs Committee report said. The Committee said it wrote to the British Foreign Secretary in May this year, asking specific questions about the discussions held to decide on Sri Lanka as the 2013 host of CHOGM which he had replied. “From this letter, it became evident that the FCO had objected to Sri Lanka’s offer to host the 2011 CHOGM, which was subsequently offered to Australia, but not its offer to host the 2013 CHOGM,” the MPs report notes. “On the information available to us, the policy followed by the FCO during discussions at the 2009 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Port of Spain on venues for future Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings seems to have been inconsistent,” the British MPs committee noted. The Committee said the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had objected to a proposal that Sri Lanka might host the 2011 CHOGM on human rights grounds but did not obstruct a proposal that it might do so in 2013. “Nor did it insist that Sri Lanka’s right to host in 2013 should be conditional on improvements in human rights. That approach now appears timid. The UK could and should have taken a more principled stand in 2009, and should have taken a more robust stand after the 2011 CHOGM in the light of the continuing serious human rights abuses in Sri Lanka,” the report said. The MPs also said that they did not believe it was productive to continue the discussion on whether or not the British Prime Minister should attend CHOGM 2013 in Colombo. (DB)