Human rights and environment transcend sovereignty of
As far as G. L. Peiris’ assertion, made at Sunday’s news conference, that the EU granting the GSP facility to Lanka dependent upon the government fulfilling its obligation to implement the human rights conventions already signed, was an attempt to ‘interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation and an attack on Lanka’s sovereignty’, it is time to edify the professor turned politician turned Rajapaksa’s Man Friday, that the concept of national sovereignty has undergone radical change and the world today is no longer what he has read of it in musty tomes long years ago cloistered in his University College library.
In the manner that no nation can today use the shield of sovereignty and indiscriminately pollute the environment on the basis it has the sovereign right to do as it pleases on its broad acres, no government today can wear sovereignty as a defensive coat of armour to ward off justified international concerns as to violations of the fundamental human view but voted to send in the troops and remove him forcibly and install the victor Barrow as President. It backed an effort by West African states to remove Jammeh forcibly. On Friday Senegalese troops stood poised on Gambia’s borders to invade the country and evict Jammeh if he refused to go. Could Jammeh claim that the international community had no right to do so, that it was interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign Gambia?
Perhaps it’s time for Professor Peiris to retire to his study and, away from the madding strife of politics, to read the latest editions of the books on the modern concept of the sovereignty of nations. Thus enlightened, instead of being a barrow boy selling alchemy concoctions, he might, who knows, perhaps even end up putting his scholastic talents to good use, and write another doctoral thesis: a new expanded modern day version of Paine’s Rights of Man?