Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Australia kept mum on Sri Lanka rights abuses in exchange for asylum deal - report...

Australia agreed to turn a blind eye to Sri Lanka's alleged human rights abuses to secure cooperation with Colombo on stopping asylum-seeker boats heading to Australia, Sri Lanka's new prime minister said in an interview.

Sri Lanka’s new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said that Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's close relationship with President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was voted out of power last month, was "a mystery" to Sri Lankans.

In an interview with The Australian newspaper, published on Monday, the leader of Sri Lanka’s centre-right United National Party said that "people connected to the previous government" had taken part in people-smuggling operations.

"It was being done by people with Rajapakse connections, but once this deal was done between Australia and the Rajapakse government, where you looked the other way (on human rights abuses), then the secretary of defense got the Navy to patrol," he told the newspaper at the prime minister’s official Temple Trees residence in Colombo.

"You could not have got anyone out of this country without someone in the security system looking the other way, the police or the Navy." Full story...

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