The Economist, Oct 8th 2011 - In October one group, under the politically correct rubric of promoting transparency and accountability, sought (so far unsuccessfully) to nobble the budget, and thus the independence, of the Office of the High Commissioner, Navi Pillay. The main instigators were Cuba, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, all of which strongly oppose an interventionist approach to human rights. Ms Pillay, a South African of Tamil extraction, had outraged the Sri Lankan government by calling for an independent investigation of alleged atrocities and war crimes by both sides in the war against the Tamil Tigers. The pro-government media there vilified her as a bullying, racist “Tamil Tigress”. In the world of UN human rights, such insults may count as compliments.

The Economist, Oct 1st 2011 | CHENNAI - ARPUTHAM AMMAL, a pensioner with curly silver hair and a wheezing cough, is an abolitionist. Perched in a gloomy warehouse in Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu, as young men bustle over an exhibition against the death penalty, she explains why. “It is not needed. The ultimate victims of the death sentence are the backward, the minorities and the weak.”

The Economist, 15 September 2011 - THE United States is not in the business of threatening its friends, said Robert O. Blake, US assistant secretary of state, in Colombo on September 14th. But, he added, smiling placidly, there will be pressure. If a domestic commission appointed by Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s president, does not provide credible answers to allegations of war crimes committed by the military, demands for “some sort of alternative mechanism” will mount.

Apr 28th 2011 - Instead, it chose a third path: to lie, and to lie big. It insisted that it pursued a policy of “zero civilian casualties”. Even as its forces shelled the shrinking “no-fire zone” in which the Tigers held some 330,000 civilians as human shields, it either denied it was doing so, or promised to stop and did not. It kept foreign observers out and bullied the local press into silence. The UN report found that “tens of thousands” were killed in January-May 2009, with most civilian casualties caused by government shelling.