{"id":63576,"date":"2019-04-13T17:27:27","date_gmt":"2019-04-13T21:27:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=63576"},"modified":"2019-04-13T17:27:27","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T21:27:27","slug":"gotabaya-told-a-sinhala-weekly-if-lasanthas-daughter-wants-to-know-who-his-murderers-areask-her-to-come-to-sri-lanka-and-meet-me-i-will-tell-her-what-happened-now-ahims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=63576","title":{"rendered":"Gotabaya Told a Sinhala Weekly \u201cIf Lasantha\u2019s daughter wants to know who his murderers are,ask her to come to Sri Lanka and meet me. I will tell her what happened.\u201d Now Ahimsa Wickrematunge Wants Gota to Tell her What he Knows in a US Court of Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY DHATHUSENA YAHAPALANA (A PARALEGAL APPRENTICE)<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to news reports, former Defence Secretary and Presidential aspirant Gotabaya Rajapaksa is facing two civil suits in separate cases linked to events in Sri Lanka during his term in office in the US federal district court in California.<\/p>\n

One is a suit filed by Ahimsa Wickrematunge who is seeking compensatory and punitive damages from the defendant \u2018for instigating and authorising the extrajudicial killing\u2019 of her father in jury trial.<\/p>\n

Her litigation is supported by the California-based Centre for Justice and Accountability.<\/p>\n

Prof of Law G.L.Peiris while confirming that a law suit has been filed in the State of California by Ahimsa Wickrematunge has queried whether the daughter of the slain Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge was using or abusing the US legal system for what he called collateral purposes.<\/p>\n

Prof. Peiris has expressed his dismay over the action taken a decade after the assassination though, since Gotabaya Rajapaksa almost every year visited the US in the past 10 years.<\/p>\n

This exploration of the US legal process relied on by Ahimsa Wickrematunge is prompted by the skepticism expressed by our \u2018Good Prof of Law\u2019 who has taught law but never practised before a judge and a jury. The good professor cannot be ignored. The skeptical legal tradition runs from Thrasymachus in Plato\u2019s Republic) to Hobbes and Bentham and even beyond. The law also has an invisible entity called \u2018justice\u2019. What follows is a simple \u2018voyage of discovery\u2019 by a layman relying on simple commonsense as the only compass for direction.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Gotabaya Told a Sinhala Weekly \u201cIf Lasantha\u2019s daughter wants to know who his murderers are,ask her to come to Sri Lanka and meet me. I will tell her what happened.\u201d Now Ahimsa Wickrematunge Wants Gota to Tell her What he Knows in a US Court of Law<\/p>\n

Why now? In 2009, Gotabaya Rajapaksa did not know much about Lasantha Wickrematunge. Hence his rhetorical inquiry \u2018who is Lasantha?\u2019<\/p>\n

In 2019 he is better informed.He told a Sinhala weekly \u201cIf Lasantha\u2019s daughter wants to know who his murderers are,\u201d Rajapaksa said, \u201cask her to come to Sri Lanka and meet me. I will tell her what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Ahimsa wants him to tell her what he knows in the US District Court in California. That seems to make eminent sense.<\/p>\n

Here is my take about seeking justice in San Francisco and serving summons in the parking lot of Trader Joe\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Victor Jara was a celebrated singer, theatre director and a university professor in Chile. His lyrical genius and haunting music about poverty and injustice earned him the sobriquet, \u201cBob Dylan of Latin America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Victor Jara was a sympathiser of the socialist President of Chile – Salvador Allende who was ousted in 1973 in CIA backed military coup led by Augusto Pinochet who promised Chileans that he will build a new Chile with character, discipline, progress and national honour.<\/p>\n

He was detained along with his students, fellow academics in a Chilean soccer stadium that has since been named after him. According to detainees who survived, Victor Jara\u2019s hands were smashed with the butt of a gun and badly beaten up. When his body was found three days after his disappearance near a cemetery, it was found riddled with 44 bullet holes.<\/p>\n

His British-born ballerina wife Joan and his daughter Amanda, fought a long-running campaign for justice in his case and had his body exhumed in 2009 for a full autopsy.<\/p>\n

Forty three years later, in 2016, a civil court jury in Florida found a former military officer, retired army lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, liable for torturing and killing Jara. Barrientos, who was living in Florida was ordered to pay $28 million in damages to Jara\u2019s family.<\/p>\n

The case against Barrientos was filed by the US-based Center for Justice and Accountability on behalf of Jara\u2019s widow, his daughter and step-daughter.<\/p>\n

It is the same human rights advocacy group that supports Ahimsa Wickrematunge in her plea for a jury trial and justice for her father slain in year 2009 at Attidiya, Sri Lanka. It seems Ahimsa\u2019s quest for closure is 30 years ahead of Amanda Jara, the daughter of Latin American Bob Dylan who found it in an Orlando courtroom in Florida.<\/p>\n

A federal jury in Orlando concluded that a former Chilean army officer who had emigrated to the United States and worked as a short-order cook was liable for the torture and extrajudicial killing of Mr. Jara at the Chilean sports stadium in 1973.<\/p>\n

The former officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 67 was a naturalised American citizen and resident of Deltona, Florida.<\/p>\n

He was named as the respondent and defendant in a civil suit brought under an American law that is known as the Alien Tort Statute.<\/p>\n

Barrientos was described in court as having bragged about shooting Jara. Mrs. Jara now aged 88, provided testimony on how her life was \u2018cut in two\u2019 after the coup and the violent death of her husband.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the end of my first life, because I lost so much on that day,\u201d she said. \u201cI lost my job and my profession. My children left their school, their friends, their home and their country. I was never able to remarry. I had been very much in love with V\u00edctor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barrientos was taken to court by the New York law firm Chadbourne & Parke with assistance from the Center for Justice and Accountability. They filed a civil lawsuit against Barrientos in 2013 on behalf of the Jara family.<\/p>\n

A former soldier, Jos\u00e9 Navarrete, testified that Barrientos boasted about having shot Jara twice in the head. \u201cHe used to show his pistol and say \u201cI killed V\u00edctor Jara with this\u201d he told the court in a videotaped deposition. Navarrete said he had not come forward with his testimony before for fear of retaliation.<\/p>\n

Barrientos told court that he went to the United States to earn money for his children\u2019s education, not to evade possible prosecution. He claimed he was never at the Chile Stadium and denied knowing who V\u00edctor Jara was before 2009, despite his widespread popularity in Chile.<\/p>\n

Several former soldiers testified through videotaped depositions, that they were part of the section from the Tejas Verdes regiment under the direct orders of Barrientos at the Stadium.<\/p>\n

Two former prisoners gave details of the violence, killings and suicides that took place in the stadium and how Jara was singled out and assaulted even as he was entering the Stadium.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat night V\u00edctor was exhibited as a trophy to other officers. They also beat him,\u201d recalled Boris Navia, a former detainee. He said one of them crushed his hand and beat his arm, saying \u201cyou\u2019ll never be able to play the guitar again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jara\u2019s daughter Manuela described the litigation as being \u201cemotionally intense.\u201d \u201cThey concentrated all of the pain, sadness and anger Chile has gone through, and specifically the horrors at the Chile Stadium. The culture of lies, cover-ups and bullying were pulverized by the weight of the truth in this courtroom.\u201d<\/p>\n

It all started with young Joelito Fil\u00e1rtiga killed by the Paraguayan police and the ingenuity of eminent jurist Peter Weiss. Weiss reached America as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria in 1941. He has involved himself with every major human rights issue in the 20th Century and the two decades of the 21st during his lifetime. They include dismantling of Nazi business cartels to the \u2018My Lai\u2019 Massacre during the Vietnam War seeking accountability under the principle of \u2018universal jurisdiction\u2019.<\/p>\n

In 1977, he sued Henry Kissinger for the State Department\u2019s complicity in the detention and death of American journalist Charles Horman during the 1973 Chilean coup. Peter Weiss was co-counsel in a legal action filed in New York by the father and sister of Joelito Fil\u00e1rtiga murdered in distant Paraguay.<\/p>\n

Joelito Fil\u00e1rtiga was a lively lad of 17 years when he was abducted and tortured to death by Americo Norberto Pe\u00f1a-Irala, an inspector-general in the Paraguayan police on March 29, 1976.<\/p>\n

Later on, that day the police showed his body to his sister Dolly Filartiga who was told \u201cHere you have what you have been looking for so long and what you deserve. Now shut up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Filartigas family believes that young Joelito was tortured and killed in retaliation for his physician father\u2019s political activities and beliefs.<\/p>\n

Dr. Filartiga commenced a criminal action in the Paraguayan courts against Pena and the police for the murder of his son. The hapless attorney – blatantly an unpatriotic Paraguayan who had the temerity to appear for Dr.Filartiga was arrested. At police headquarters, he was shackled to a wall and Pena threatened him with death. The attorney was later disbarred.<\/p>\n

Two years later, by a quirk of fate Dolly Filartiga who was in the United States as an asylum petitioner discovered that Pe\u00f1a-Irala was also living in New York.<\/p>\n

In 1978, the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York instituted a \u2018Wrongful death action\u2019 \u2013 the civil equivalent of murder against Pe\u00f1a-Irala, on behalf of Joelito\u2019s sister Dolly and her father Dr. Joel Fil\u00e1rtiga who was living in Paraguay.<\/p>\n

The legal action was based on an ancient law enacted by the first Congress of the United Sates called the Alien Tort Statute that gave US district courts the \u201cjurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

The action was dismissed by the District Court but was reversed by the Court of Appeal of the second circuit which is the second highest court after the US Supreme Court. Human Rights lawyers and activists regard it as landmark in US law and subsequent litigation under the Alien Tort Act have radically changed human rights law as practised, both in the US and in general international law.<\/p>\n

The US Court of Appeal held that a Paraguayan plaintiff can prevail against a Paraguayan defendant on the basis of events that occurred entirely in Paraguay. That was not the end of the story. US multinationals conniving with foreign autocrats saw it as an entryway for \u2018do-gooding\u2019 rights champions to interfere in some of their overseas operations that were not quite above board. Even the US government at the behest of corporate interests has intervened in cases filed under the Alien Torts Statute and the Joelito Fil\u00e1rtiga precedent to reject them.<\/p>\n

However, the US Supreme Court has upheld the Act with the proviso that \u201ccourts should require any claims based on the present day law of nations to rest on the international character accepted by the civilized world and defined with the specificity comparable to the features of the 18th century paradigms we have recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n

The concluding paragraph of the pathbreaking judgement of the US Court of Appeal in the Joelito Fil\u00e1rtiga case has a timeless appeal to what the US Supreme Court later described as the \u2018Civilized World\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the twentieth century the international community has come to recognize the common danger posed by the flagrant disregard of basic human rights and particularly, the right to be free of torture. Spurred first by the Great War, and then the Second, civilized nations have banded together to prescribe acceptable norms of international behaviour. From the ashes of the Second World War arose the United Nations Organization, amid hopes that an era of peace and cooperation had at last begun. Though many of these aspirations have remained elusive goals, that circumstance cannot diminish the true progress that has been made. In the modern age, humanitarian and practical considerations have combined to lead the nations of the world to recognize that respect for fundamental human rights is in their individual and collective interest. Among the rights universally proclaimed by all nations, as we have noted, is the right to be free of physical torture. Indeed, for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostishumani generis, an enemy of all mankind. Our holding today, giving effect to a jurisdictional provision enacted by our First Congress, is a small but important step in the fulfillment of the ageless dream to free all people from brutal violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Aliens Tort Statute was enacted in 1789, the international order was contending with slavery, piracy, duelling ambassadors and aggrieved potentates. In the 21st Century international law has expanded in many directions including the vital sphere of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is recognized by US courts as a treaty and a covenant subscribed to by the US. Under US law the Alien Tort Statute gives survivors of flagrant human rights abuses the right to sue the perpetrators in the United States.<\/p>\n

The Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), passed in 1991 and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, allows U.S. citizens and non-citizens to bring claims for torture and extrajudicial killing committed in foreign countries.<\/p>\n

Since the seminal ruling on the murder and mutilation of Joelito Fil\u00e1rtiga many cases have been filed against individual perpetrators found in the United States. These are filed by survivors of human rights abuses who have lost faith in the justice systems in their home countries. The litigation is a complex process that needs much preparatory work.<\/p>\n

To bring a lawsuit against an individual, that person must be directly or indirectly responsible for the human rights violations. That needs evidence that will convince the court to entertain the case and demonstrable facts that will convince a jury. The alleged perpetrator must be personally served with the lawsuit while in the United States. In other words, he or she must live in or visit the United States.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:Sunday Observer<\/em><\/p>\n

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BY DHATHUSENA YAHAPALANA (A PARALEGAL APPRENTICE) According to news reports, former Defence Secretary and Presidential aspirant Gotabaya Rajapaksa is facing two civil suits in separate cases linked to events in Sri Lanka during his term in office in the US federal district court in California. One is a suit filed by Ahimsa Wickrematunge who is …<\/p>\n

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