“We have seen some great successes at the Human Rights Council over the past year, and I am delighted with the achievements of the latest session that the UK has worked hard to secure.”

The All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils (APPGT) has welcomed the UNHRC resolution on Sri Lanka in a statement released on Tuesday.

Several members of the APPGT, from the ruling coalition and the opposition Labour Party, attended the 19th UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, including Siobhain McDonough MP, Tom Brake MP and John Mann MP.

Full text of statement:

Less than a week after the European Union was at the forefront of passing a resolution at the UNHRC calling for accountability, than Sri Lanka's spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs announced on Tuesday that the government had decided to close embassies in Europe that were not serving any purpose, opening up new embassies in Asia instead.

The spokesperson said,

Statement from Ken Livingstone, the opposition Labour party’s candidate for Mayor of London (March 27):

As the England cricket team commences its 2012 tour of Sri Lanka, the Tamil Youth Organisation UK (TYO UK) and the undersigned UK university Tamil societies continue to call on the England and Wales Cricket Board to suspend all bilateral arrangements with Sri Lanka's national cricket team until there has been meaningful progress on ensuring accountability and justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. We call for an immediate end to the on-going human rights violations being committed by the Sri Lankan Government and its security forces in the North-East of the island.

Almost three years after the end of the armed conflict, and a year since we first called for a boycott of Sri Lankan cricket - in line with wider trade sanctions, and economic isolation as a means to urging Sri Lanka to act - there has been no significant progress on human rights or accountability. Instead, the time and space afforded to Sri Lanka by the international community, in the name of development, reconciliation and international engagement, have led to an ever increasing and brazen disregard for human rights by the Sri Lankan state and fiercer attempts to prevent accountability and justice.

Instead of repealing emergency laws, scaling down the military, and working to protect and safeguard individual rights and freedoms, the Sri Lankan state has been emboldened by the international community’s continued sanctioning of impunity. It is pursuing an agenda of increased militarisation and colonisation of the Tamil areas, as well as widespread, and systematic human rights abuses. Reports published by international human rights organisations over the past year, have detailed evidence of on-going human rights violations against Tamil civilians in the North-East of the island, including abduction, illegal detention, torture, the torture of asylum seekers deported from the UK, extra-judicial killings, sexual violence, and the relentless clamp down on media freedom.

Sri Lanka’s on-going disregard for human rights is against a back drop of impunity. Three years post-conflict the credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity, resulting in the deaths of at least 40,000 Tamil civilians as detailed within a UN Panel of Experts report, remain unaccounted for. The past year has seen nothing but the failure of Sri Lanka’s internal inquiry and continued indignant resistance towards an independent process.

After ordering the mandatory registration of all websites disseminating news on Sri Lanka with the Media Ministry last year, the ministry's secretary, W.B Ganegala stated that 50 of the 100 applications made by news websites for registration had been rejected.

[Updated with further comments]

Sri Lanka on Monday made it clear that it will not abide by the United Nations Human Rights Council resolution last week that censured it over its rights abuses and said it would only implement "feasible" recommendations of its own panel that probed the bloody civil war.