Sri Lanka to ask UN for more time on human rights probes: Foreign Minister

Sri Lanka says it needs more time to fulfill promises given to the U.N. human rights body to investigate war crime allegations, Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera told foreign correspondents  that the government will seek more time at the next U.N. human rights session, starting Feb. 27 in Geneva.

Samaraweera was quoted by AP as saying that Sri Lanka will commit itself to going ahead as planned even though it has not been able to achieve all that it wanted.

In a joint resolution in 2015 at the U.N. Human Rights Council, Sri Lanka promised to work toward ethnic reconciliation, including investigating alleged wartime abuses.

It had promised the U.N., among other things, a truth-seeking mechanism, a judicial mechanism to prosecute those who are accused of human rights abuses and a new constitution that takes into account the island nation's varied ethnicities and religions. However, little progress has been made.

The U.N. human rights chief had called for a hybrid court with local and international judges. Samaraweera,  said that Sri Lanka had agreed only to foreign participation at different levels in the judicial process, but not to have foreign judges hearing the cases.