This is what the United States'  Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Susan Rice said in response to the release of the UN Panel of Experts' Report on Sri Lanka:

"With the UN report practically confirming human rights violations and brutal repression that was earlier in the realm of speculation or dismissed as biased or partisan reportage, the Indian government should now move the UN to initiate necessary steps to bring Rajapaksa to stand trial for war crimes and genocide along with his generals, senior ministers and all others who were party to the

“India should not subject itself again to be charged as supporting genocide by Sri Lanka.”

Reports on gender-based war crimes in Sri Lanka from Headlines Today, part of the India Today group:

“The publication of this report will cause irreparable damage to the reconciliation efforts of Sri Lanka. It will damage the UN system too.”

- G. L. Peiris, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister.

“The UN report says that the alleged crimes of both the warring parties and subsequent cover-up by the government constitutes ‘an assault on the entire system of international law and security’.

This is the English text of the Sri Lankan government-sponsored petition against the UN expert panel's report:

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.

Following the UN expert panel's submission of its report on Sri Lanka to the Secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, the British Tamils Forum (BTF), an umbrella group of Tamil community organisations, said Wednesday:

King's College London (KCL) Tamil Society's raises funds for the Sivan Arul Ilam Charity in Mannar. See the video created by Ratheeson Thillainathan for the Society:

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.