Australian Greens senator Lee Rhiannon was detained by immigration officials in Sri Lanka for over three hours but was last reported as being on a flight back to Sydney.
Australian Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon and NZ Green MP Jan Logie were meeting with local residents when four Sri Lankan immigration officials arrived at the location, confiscated their passports and detained them for over three hours.
Senator Rhiannon and Ms Logie were on a fact-finding mission in Sri Lanka in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) which began yesterday.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Travel and the Government of Sri Lanka had been notified of Senator Rhiannon’s trip to Sri Lanka prior to her visit.
Before their detainment, Senator Rhiannon and Jan Logie MP released a statement which said they have found that the ongoing abuses of human and legal rights in Sri Lanka so serious that the Commonwealth meeting scheduled for Colombo should not proceed and that the Sri Lanka government should not be given the chair of CHOGM for the next two years.
Senator Rhiannon will be reporting her findings to the Australian parliament this week.
The controversy around Sri Lanka hosting CHOGM continues, as the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh has said he would not be attending the meeting.
The Canadian PM Stephen Harper is also boycotting CHOGM, citing President Rajapakse’s failure to investigate allegations of war crimes.
The Greens MPs’ joint statement reads in part: ’If CHOGM goes ahead and if Sri Lanka is given the chair of this organisation the Commonwealth will have failed the people of Sri Lanka and damaged its own high standing with the international community.
‘Elected officials and members of civil society in Sri Lanka have provided us with examples of massive illegal land confiscation by the armed forces; people being gaoled and detained with regular disregard for legal rights; violence, often involving rape, of women and children with no police investigation of these crimes; and ongoing intimidation of media workers.
‘We visited areas where the army is occupying people’s land. The homes of the displaced people are now tin shacks serviced by dirt pot holed roads. Many people have been living like this for more than two decades.
‘Large numbers of women regularly suffer sexual abuse perpetrated by members of the Sri Lankan armed forces. One lawyer described to us the evidence collected about these crimes. ‘The level of hardship for women and their dependents is shocking. More than 40,000 households in the north and east of the country are now female headed and few of them receive any government assistance if they cannot find work.
‘Politicians described to us incidents in the past week where young party workers have been intimidated and detained. One worker we met who had just been released from gaol after ten months was never charged.
‘The harassment of media workers and media owners continues. In Jaffna we saw the bullet holes in the printing presses, the computers and walls of one media outlet. Journalists and paper distributors have been attacked.
‘Clearly this is an unsafe country for journalists to work as those who commit these crimes have not been investigated or charged. We were left with the impression that the government is becoming increasingly repressive towards those committed to a critical independent examination of events in Sri Lanka.
‘If CHOGM events proceed in Sri Lanka the Commonwealths heads need to ensure that their handshakes, talks and communiques with President Rajapaksa are not used by this regime to claim legitimacy for their current operations.
‘The Commonwealth played a key role in challenging apartheid in South Africa and oppression in Fiji. CHOGM should continue to stand by its own values and principles by working for improved human rights protection and justice in Sri Lanka.’
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
