Colombo: A group of failed Sri Lankan asylum seekers, mostly Tamils, arrived here on Wednesday after being deported from the UK, amid concerns about their safety by a top global rights group.
A total of 52 people arrived on a chartered flight from the UK. This was the third such flight of deportees from the UK since December last year. The flight departed London despite concerns raised by the New York-based rights watch group Human Rights Watch (HRW), which had called on the UK to suspend the deportation of Tamils and immediately review its policy on the rights situation in Sri Lanka.
The HRW said it had documented cases of abuse that previous returnees had been allegedly subjected to by the Sri Lankan authorities.
The British Foreign Office had said the government only sends people back to Sri Lanka when they and the courts are satisfied that an individual had no protection needs upon return. The Foreign Office had noted that a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights had said that not all Tamil asylum-seekers required protection. Also that there had been no substantiated allegations of mistreatment of those returned from the UK. A large number of the island nation’s Tamils fled overseas, mostly to Western nations and India, in the wake of the conflict between the government and LTTE in the mid-1980s. (PTI)
