On Thursday, Philip Alston, a human rights lawyer who is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said that reports by three experts he had retained to examine video that appears to show the execution of prisoners in Sri Lanka “strongly suggest that the video is authentic.”
A screenshot from video exiled Sri Lankan journalists say was filmed in Sri Lanka in January 2009.Mr. Alston explained that he had commissioned reports from the experts — in forensic pathology, forensic video analysis and firearm evidence — after the government of Sri Lanka responded to his request for “an independent investigation” by claiming that the video was fake based on reports produced by four investigators, two of whom worked for the Sri Lankan military, that were, Mr. Alston said, “more impressionistic than scientific.”
After making the results of the scientific analysis of the video public in New York, Mr. Alston called for an inquiry into the executions it appears to document, which a group of exiled Sri Lankan journalists say was a war crime recorded on a soldier’s cellphone in January 2009, near the end of the government’s war with Tamil separatists.
Mr. Alston made the full text of the experts’ technical analysis available for download on a United Nations Web site. In his introduction to that technical analysis — also available for download — Mr. Alston wrote that the experts had “systematically rebutted most of the arguments relied upon by Sri Lanka’s experts in support of their contention that the video was faked.”
A partial transcript of Mr. Alston’s remarks was published on Channel 4’s Web site. His call for “the establishment of an independent inquiry to carry out an impartial investigation into war crimes” which may have been committed in Sri Lanka was included in a news release from his office.
On Friday, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, Rohitha Bogollagama, responded to the findings of Mr. Alston’s experts by saying, “We reject these allegations,” Reuters reported. Mr. Bogollagama ignored the conclusions and pointed only to some of the details the experts said they were unable to explain, saying, “In light of those continued contradictory findings, we can’t accept it.”
As Jonathan Miller noted in a blog post on the Channel 4 News Web site, “the U.N. Secretary General, apparently prompted by Philip Alston’s findings, has resurrected the possibility of appointing a Commission of Experts to advise him on alleged violations of human rights and humanitarian law in Sri Lanka.”
In December another report by a forensic video specialist commissioned by The Times of London to examine the video concluded, “This is clearly an original recording.”
On Thursday, the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Alston was edited so that it temporarily read, “Philip G. Alston is a prominent international racist law scholar and human rights practitioner/ tool of western oppression of developing countries.”
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