21 May, 2008 - Published 16:25 GMT

Sri Lanka loses UN vote

Sri Lanka was voted out from UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on Wednesday in New York.

101 members voted for Sri Lanka but four other countries in the region received more votes than Sri Lanka.

Japan with 155 votes, Bahrain with 142 votes, South Korea with 139 votes and Pakistan with 114 votes were elected to the 47-member council.

From the Asian region, East Timor was also voted out as the country only received 92 votes.

Pakistan voted in

192 members of the UN voted to elect 15 members including four members from the Asian region.

Argentina, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Chile, France, Gabon, Ghana, Slovakia, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Zambia are the other 11 members elected on Wednesday.

Three Noble laureates, former US President Jimmy Carter, South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel from Argentina urged member states to vote Sri Lanka out from the Council.

On the eve of the vote, the group said that the number of disappearances and abductions on the island amounted to a national crisis.

Archbishop Tutu accused the Sri Lankan authorities of what he called the most serious imaginable systematic abuses of human rights.

'Dirty wars' in Latin America

Argentine Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel compared the routine torture and the hundreds of "disappearances" and extrajudicial killings committed by Sri Lankan government forces to the "dirty wars" waged by various Latin American governments against their own citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.

More than 20 human rights watchdogs led by Human Rights Watch (HRW) also urged the countries to vote Sri Lanka out.

Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Minister Mahindra Samarasinghe told BBC Sandeshaya on Tuesday that he was optimistic that Sri Lanka be re-elected to the UNHRC.

He said Sri Lanka’s human rights record itself speaks of its suitability for re-election.

Sri Lanka was a past president of the Asian Group when the Universal Periodic Review was discussed at the Human Rights Council, Minister Samarasinghe said.

Sri Lanka is eligible to contest again as a result of losing the vote on Wednesday.