Radhika Coomaraswamy | |
---|---|
United Nations Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict | |
In office April 2006 –13 July 2012 | |
Constitutional Council (Sri Lanka) as a civil representative | |
In office 10 September 2015 –10 September 2018 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Colombo,Ceylon | 17 September 1953
Nationality | Sri Lankan |
Parent(s) | Rajendra Coomaraswamy (father) Wijeyamani (mother) |
Relatives | Indrajit Coomaraswamy (brother) |
Alma mater | Yale University Harvard University Columbia University Amherst College University of Edinburgh University of Essex CUNY School of Law United Nations International School |
Awards | Deshamanya |
Deshamanya Radhika Coomaraswamy (born 17 September 1953) [1] is a Sri Lankan lawyer,diplomat and human rights advocate who served as the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations,Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict until 13 July 2012. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed her to the position in April 2006. [2] She was nominated to the Constitutional Council (Sri Lanka) as a civil representative on 10 September 2015. [3] In 2017,after atrocities against the Rohingya people,she was appointed a Member of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar.
Coomaraswamy was born on 17 September 1953 in Colombo,Ceylon. She was the younger daughter of civil servant Rajendra Coomaraswamy (Roving Raju) and his wife Wijeyamani. Her paternal grandfather C. Coomaraswamy was a civil servant and her maternal grandfather S. K. Wijeyaratnam was chairman of Negombo Urban Council. [4] She has one elder brother,Indrajit Coomaraswamy. She is a graduate of the United Nations International School in New York City. She received her B.A. from Yale University,her J.D. from Columbia University,an LLM from Harvard University and honorary PhDs from Amherst College,the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,the University of Edinburgh,the University of Essex and the CUNY School of Law.[ citation needed ]
Coomaraswamy is a lawyer by training and formerly the Chairperson of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission,is an internationally known human rights advocate who has worked as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women (1994-2003).
In her reports to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights,she has written on violence in the family,violence in the community,violence against women during armed conflict and the problem of international trafficking. A strong advocate on women's rights,she has intervened on behalf of women throughout the world seeking clarification from governments in cases involving violence against women. She also compiled a report on "comfort women",citing Seiji Yoshida's remark (his testimony was later judged to be a fabrication), [5] and has conducted field visits to Japan and Korea on the problem of "comfort women",Rwanda,Colombia,Haiti and Indonesia with regard to violence against women in war time,Poland,India,Bangladesh and Nepal on the issue of trafficking,the United States on women in prisons,Brazil on domestic violence,and Cuba on violence against women generally.[ citation needed ]
Coomaraswamy was appointed Chairperson of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission in May 2003. She has served as a member of the Global Faculty of the New York University School of Law. She also taught a summer course at New College,Oxford,every year on the International Human Rights of Women from 1996-2006. She has published,including two books on constitutional law and numerous articles on ethnic studies and the status of women.[ citation needed ]
In 2014,Coomaraswamy was appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon as lead author on a Global Study on the implementation of UNSC resolution 1325,on women,peace and security. The Global Study will be presented to the Secretary-General and to the public in October,2015,when the Security Council will conduct a High-level Review to assess progress at the global,regional and national levels in implementing resolution 1325 (2000).
In January 2008,the United Nations requested that Coomaraswamy,as special representative for children in armed conflict,be allowed to observe the American military tribunal of child soldier Omar Khadr,but she was denied entrance. [6]
In May 2011,Coomaraswamy gave a lecture entitled "Children and Armed Conflict:The International Response" at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace &Justice Distinguished Lecture Series.[ citation needed ]
In November 2011,Coomaraswamy gave a lectured entitled "Human Rights:Impact of Armed Conflict on Children" through Monmouth University's Institute for Global Understanding's United Nations Academic Impact Lecture Series.[ citation needed ]
The President of Sri Lanka conferred on her the title of Deshamanya,a national honour. She has also received the International Law Award of the American Bar Association,the Human Rights Award of the International Human Rights Law Group,the Bruno Kreisky Award of 2000,the Leo Ettinger Human Rights Prize of the University of Oslo,Archbishop Oscar Romero Award of the University of Dayton,the William J. Butler Award from the University of Cincinnati,and the Robert S. Litvack Award from McGill University. In November 2005,in recognition of her service to the country and the world.[ citation needed ]
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was a Tamil militant organization that was based in northeastern Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan Civil War was a civil war fought in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009. Beginning on 23 July 1983,it was an intermittent insurgency against the government by the Velupillai Prabhakaran-led Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The LTTE fought to create an independent Tamil state called Tamil Eelam in the north-east of the island,due to the continuous discrimination and violent persecution against Sri Lankan Tamils by the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka government.
Charlotte Anne Bunch is an American feminist author and organizer in women's rights and human rights movements. Bunch is currently the founding director and senior scholar at the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University in New Brunswick,New Jersey. She is also a distinguished professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers.
Sunila Abeysekera was a Sri Lankan human rights campaigner. She worked on women's rights in Sri Lanka and in the South Asia region for decades as an activist and scholar. Quitting a career as a singer,Abeysekera briefly joined the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and then founded the Women and Media Collective in 1984. As head of the INFORM Human Rights Documentation Centre,she monitored human rights violations by all parties in the civil war. She received the United Nations Human Rights Award in 1999 and the Didi Nirmala Deshpande South Asian Peace and Justice Award in 2013.
Human rights in Sri Lanka provides for fundamental rights in the country. The Sri Lanka Constitution states that every person is entitled to freedom of thought,conscience and religion,including the freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice. And,that every person is equal before the law.
Navanethem "Navi" Pillay is a South African jurist who served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. A South African of Indian Tamil origin,she was the first non-white woman judge of the High Court of South Africa,and she has also served as a judge of the International Criminal Court and President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Her four-year term as High Commissioner for Human Rights began on 1 September 2008 and was extended an additional two years in 2012. She was succeeded in September 2014 by Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad. In April 2015 Pillay became the 16th Commissioner of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty. She is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.
The Sri Lankan state has been accused of state terrorism against the Tamil minority as well as the Sinhalese majority,during the two Marxist–Leninist insurrections. The Sri Lankan government and the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have been charged with massacres,indiscriminate shelling and bombing,extrajudicial killings,rape,torture,disappearance,arbitrary detention,forced displacement and economic blockade. According to Amnesty International,state terror was institutionalized into Sri Lanka's laws,government and society.
Deshamanya is the second-highest national honour of Sri Lanka awarded by the Government of Sri Lanka as a civil honour. It is awarded for "highly meritorious service",and is conventionally used as a title or prefix to the recipient's name.
Militant use of children in Sri Lanka has been an internationally recognized problem since the inception of the Sri Lankan civil war in 1983. The primary recruiters of under the age of 18 children are the rebel LTTE movement and the Karuna group,a break-away faction of the LTTE working with Sri Lanka Forces. Human Rights Watch criticized that threats and intimidation were used by the LTTE to force Tamil families in Sri Lanka to furnish children for military duty. When families reject,their children are sometimes kidnapped at night from their homes or forced recruited while walking to school. Parents who refuse to allow their children to be recruited suffer retaliation by the Tamil Tigers,which may include violence or detention.
Sarathambal Saravanbavananthatkurukal or better known as Sarathambal was a minority Sri Lankan Tamil woman who was gang raped and killed on 28 December 1999. This became an internationally known incident of the Sri Lankan Civil War.
The war was waged for over a quarter of a century,with an estimated 70,000 killed by 2007. Immediately following the end of war,on 20 May 2009,the UN estimated a total of 80,000–100,000 deaths. However,in 2011,referring to the final phase of the war in 2009,the Report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka stated,"A number of credible sources have estimated that there could have been as many as 40,000 civilian deaths." The large majority of these civilian deaths in the final phase of the war were said to have been caused by indiscriminate shelling by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces.
There were war crimes and crimes against humanity that were committed by the Sri Lankan military and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the Sri Lankan Civil War,particularly during the final months of the Eelam War IV phase in 2009. The war crimes include attacks on civilians and civilian buildings by both sides;executions of combatants and prisoners by both sides;enforced disappearances by the Sri Lankan military and paramilitary groups backed by them;sexual violence by the Sri Lankan military;the systematic denial of food,medicine,and clean water by the government to civilians trapped in the war zone;child recruitment,hostage taking,use of military equipment in the proximity of civilians and use of forced labor by the Tamil Tigers.
Chandra Lekha Sriram (1971–2018) was Professor of Law at the University of London,School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She has written and lectured widely on conflict prevention,post-conflict peacebuilding,human rights,international criminal law,and transitional justice. Her most recent monograph,Peace as governance:Power-sharing,armed groups,and contemporary peace negotiations (2008),offered a comparative critical examination of the use of power-sharing incentives in peace processes in Colombia,Sri Lanka,and Sudan. Previous monographs on transitional justice and international criminal accountability,Confronting past human rights violations:Justice versus peace in times of transition (2004) and Globalizing Justice for mass atrocities:A revolution in accountability (2005);examined transitional justice and internationalized and externalized criminal justice processes in or for Sierra Leone,Timor-Leste,El Salvador,Honduras,Sri Lanka,South Africa,and Argentina.
On 4 March 1994 the Human Rights Council passed Resolution 1994/45 on the question of integrating the rights of women into the human rights mechanisms of the United Nations and the elimination of violence against women. This Resolution established the mandate of the "Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women its causes and consequences". The initial appointment was for a three-year period. as of November 2021 the special rapporteur was Reem Alsalem.
The International Bar Association (IBA),founded in 1947,is a bar association of international legal practitioners,bar associations and law societies. The IBA in 2018 had a membership of more than 80,000 individual lawyers and 190 bar associations and law societies. Its global headquarters are located in London,England,and it has regional offices in Washington,D.C.,United States,Seoul,South Korea and São Paulo,Brazil.
Gender inequality in Sri Lanka is centered on the inequalities that arise between men and women in Sri Lanka. Specifically,these inequalities affect many aspects of women's lives,starting with sex-selective abortions and male preferences,then education and schooling in childhood,which influence job opportunities,property rights,access to health and political participation in adulthood. While Sri Lanka is ranked well on several gender equality indices in comparison to other countries in the region,there are also some sources that question the verity of these indices. However,globally,Sri Lanka ranks relatively lower on gender equality indices. Overall,this pattern of social history that disempowers females produces a cycle of undervaluing females,providing only secondary access to health care and schooling and thus fewer opportunities to take on high level jobs or training,which then exacerbates the issue of low political participation and lowered social rights,a cycle studied and noted on by Dr. Elaine Enarson,a disaster sociologist studying the connection between disaster and the role of women.
University of Oslo's Human Rights Award honours individuals who have made important contributions in different fields. The award was launched in 1986 and since then,it is awarded every year to notable people from different walks of life. Those years when the award was not distributed are 1997,1999,2003,and 2004.
Rima Salah is currently the chair of the Early Childhood Peace Consortium (ECPC) and is an assistant clinical professor at the Child Study Center,Yale School of Medicine.
Tejshree Thapa was a Nepalese human rights lawyer. She was recognized for her role in investigating and documenting human rights violations,including widespread sexual violence and other atrocities committed during the Yugoslav Wars,the Sri Lanka Civil War,and the Nepal Civil War.