Robert Blake is the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia. The below is extracted from his comments on May 4 at the American Centre in Colombo (see full transcript here).

The United States attaches great importance to the dialogue that is now taking place between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA).

The below is the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) response to the UN expert panel's report on Sri Lanka (edited for brevity):

We have read the disclosure made by the media, said to be the Executive Summary of the Report submitted by the Advisory Panel to the United Nations Secretary General (UNSG).

"The role of India and the US is probably going to determine whether the pressure mounts on Sri Lanka or the [UN expert panel's] report is quickly forgotten. If one takes a cue from developments over recent years, Colombo’s successful prosecution of the war would not have been possible without both overt support and sins of omission and commission by both New Delhi and Washington."

Based on leaked extracts, the UN expert panel’s report on Sri Lanka constitutes a watershed moment in international understanding of the crimes committed in the closing phase of the war in Sri Lanka.

Crucially, although the word does not appear in the extracts, the report’s contents well supports the charge that Sri Lanka engaged in genocide of the Tamils. The report lays out in detail the calculated, deliberate and systematic targeting of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan armed forces, operating under the direct command of the country’s top political leadership.

The former UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka, Gordon Weiss, has aptly termed the publishing of the UN experts’ report as a ‘Srebrenica’ moment for Sri Lanka and indeed for the world.

The analogy is correct on many counts. Firstly, it was in relation to Srebrenica that the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) most clearly formulated the principle that part destruction – specifically, a geographically contained (i.e a small territory) destruction - of an ethnic or national group constituted genocide.

The British Tamils Forum welcomes the report by the UN advisory panel on Sri Lanka, submitted to the UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon on 13th April 2011. The report, appears to have restored by a small measure the faith in the UN, the Tamil people had lost in 2009, when their cry for intervention fell on deaf ears, resulting in the genocide of Tamils. We call upon the UN to make the report public, especially as it has already been leaked to the press.

The report by the UN expert panel on the final months of Sri Lanka’s war sets out a harrowing account of government forces’ conduct. Hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were subject to targeted mass bombardment, starvation and denial of medical assistance, resulting in tens of thousands of casualties and widespread suffering.

Extracts of the UN report leaked to the Sri Lankan press have, quite rightly, caused shock and prompted press coverage and commentary across the world along with renewed calls for an independent, international investigation.

In Sri Lanka, however, reaction has, predictably, been quite different: the report by respected international experts has been met with denial, dismissal and defiance by President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government. Crucially, moreover, this categorical rejection and indignation is echoed across the Sinhala polity.

Instead of supporting international calls for a proper investigation and the prosecution of those responsible for mass atrocities against what are – supposedly – fellow citizens Sri Lanka’s mainstream media, commentators and, now, the main opposition parties have instead rallied to defend the regime and its conduct of the war. (The only exception, also predictably, is the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the main Tamil political party, which has welcomed the report and its recommendations.)

The Sinhala nation has effectively closed ranks to defend its government and armed forces. This collective refusal to even countenance investigation of the state’s war crimes not only vindicates the call for an international inquiry, it also highlights the fundamental and enduring ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka.

These are comments by Amnesty International’s Sri Lanka researcher, Yolanda Foster, in an interview to Channel 4 News Saturday.

“[The UN panel’s] report is a call for action because it highlights the scale and gravity of what happened in the final months of the war in Sri Lanka.

“Amnesty believes an international independent investigation should be set up without further delay.

Canada’s decision to deport the 74-year old widow of assassinated Tamil parliamentarian Joseph Parajasingham on the grounds she is a member “by association” of the Liberation Tigers exemplifies the Kafkaesque logics of the country’s asylum policy as implemented by its Immigration and Refugee Board.

In Canada, as in many Western states, asylum and immigration policy has long been controversial and marked by heated political and public debates. These have intensified amid the insecurities since the global financial crisis, and border agencies in many Western states are under intense pressure to stem immigration – and not just from developing countries. However some of the recent decisions made, and the logics put forward for these, by the IRB stand out as especially perverse.