Human rights campaigner and refugee advocate Victoria Martin-Iverson has very publicly challenged Crown Casinos boss James Packer about his decision to go into business with the brutal and murderous Rajapaksa regime.

James Packer:

“Sri Lanka is a beautiful and unique country with a huge tourism potential and I have great confidence in its future and it is Sri Lanka’s time to shine in Asia.”

A tribunal of 11 eminent judges has unanimously found the Sri Lankan government guilty of the crime of genocide against ethnic Tamil people. Sitting in Bremen, from December 7 to 10, the Second Session of the Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka found that the crime of genocide has been and is being committed against the Eelam Tamils as a national group.

This information went to Canberra and had been ignored by government for reasons of policy and politics. This would suggest that both major parties knowingly acted illegally with respect to processing Tamil asylum seekers. How low can we go?

Lower, it seems. I was also informed that the high commission has now ceased briefings from Tamil sources in the north, presumably on the basis of what they don’t know they don’t have to lie about. A form of deniability adopted and refined by Hitler’s Third Reich towards the final solution of the Jewish question.

The tribunal requested that states able to do so should take Tamil asylum seekers as refugees

James Packer’s response:

He excused the decision with the fatuous observation that the International Criminal Court and the UN were too politicised. He expressed disbelief that the criticisms were factual, based on anything other than politics.

Then he mentioned the pending “election”, which he said would be returning President Mahinda Rajapaksa with a substantial majority. The irony of that prediction was clearly lost on him.

Perhaps worried he had been a tad too dismissive of the very real human rights concerns, he went on to observe ‒ rather oddly, I thought ‒ that war is hell and the Middle East (?) in turmoil. He said he and his family were terribly sad about that and noted that few nations were free from allegations of human rights abuses.