United Nations (UN) Assistant Secretary-General (ASG) for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific Khaled Khiari will be in Sri Lanka for an official visit from Tuesday (23) to Thursday (25).
UN Sri Lanka said in a statement on Monday (22) that Khiari will meet senior government officials, representatives of political parties and civil society, religious leaders, and the diplomatic community.
The visit follows UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s meeting with Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in September in New York. At the meeting, which came 15 months after a warning from Rajapaksa that he might take the island out of the UN and its agencies if the world body pursued war crimes allegations against Colombo, he had pledged cooperation.
“President Rajapaksa said that he was always ready to work closely with the United Nations,” his office said in a two-page statement even as the UN’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva had announced just a week prior that it had collected some 120,000 pieces of evidence of abuses by Sri Lankan forces.
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