Four foreign representatives to visit Sri Lanka amidst crisis

As the Sri Lankan financial crisis continues, representatives from the UK, Hungary, Turkey and Korea are set to visit the island.

The visit follows China’s foreign minister visit to Sri Lanka as part of his first multi-country trip of the new year. During his visit, Chinese minister Wang Yi maintained that third parties should not intervene in its relationship with Sri Lanka and pledged to continue its support for the island.

Read more here: ‘No third party should interfere’ in Sino-Sri Lankan relations claims China’s Foreign Minister

Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, is set to visit Sri Lanka tomorrow whilst the UK’s South Asian Minister Lord Tariq Ahmad will reportedly visit Sri Lanka on 18 January. Speaker of the National Assembly of Korea, Park Byeong-seug, is expected to visit on 19 January and Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, is expected to arrive in Sri Lanka at the end of the month.

In November Lord Ahmad met with Tamil National Alliance spokesperson and representative MA Sumanthiran where he emphasised the importance of "upholding human rights, post-conflict accountability and reconciliation, as well as the importance of respecting the rights of all minorities".

The meeting came as the Foreign Office has issued a blistering statement on the continued state of human rights deterioration in Sri Lanka. The highlights the government’s continued obstruction of “accountability in a number of emblematic human rights cases”; the “surveillance and intimidation of human rights activists”; and condemned the crackdown on memorialisation events.

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