Sri Lanka Rights Watch 42 – The LLRC and Human Rights Action Plans

The National Action Plan for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights 2011 – 2016 as well as the full series of  Sri Lanka Rights Watch are available at the Peace & Reconciliation Website.

Having now gone through the LLRC Action Plan, I can understand how sensible it was of the Cabinet to appoint, not politicians, but the Secretary to the President to work on it. And he in turn was inspired to appoint extremely competent public servants who would

not be looking over their shoulders to see what political or personal fallouts their recommendations might cause. It was also very sensible to have selected a couple of people who, in addition to their personal integrity to recommend them, have work experience that relates so closely to the major concerns of the LLRC report.

Not obviously coincidentally, these two Secretaries are perhaps the main contributors to the Task Force intended to expedite implementation of the National Human Rights Action Plan. One of them also contributed seminally to its formulation, both by chairing one of the Committees we had appointed in specific subject areas when the Ministry of Human Rights was preparing the plan, and then by contributing more actively than I think anyone else, when the Plan did not have a home as it were and the Attorney General kindly steered it through and gave us his rooms for meetings to produce a final draft.