Australia today asked the UN's rights watchdog to probe into allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka during the the war with LTTE.
Australia today asked the UN's rights watchdog to probe into allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka during the the war with LTTE, stepping up pressure on visiting president Mahinda Rajapaksa.
"We simply say very clearly to our friends in Sri Lanka that it is of fundamental importance that the upcoming reconciliation commission report deal with the various questions which have now been raised in the UN report on allegations of human rights abuses within Sri Lanka," Rudd said.
"The Australian national position is that the Human Rights Council needs to re-visit its earlier deliberations on this matter," he was quoted as saying by ABC news.
Later, Prime Minister Julia Gillard met Rajapaksa and discussed the allegations of human rights abuse in his country. Their meeting came as damning photographs emerged allegedly showing executions and abuse by Sri Lankan soldiers.
The two leaders are in Perth for the Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting (CHOGM) but Rajapaksa has been surrounded by controversy since his arrival in Australia.
Meanwhile, president of the International Commission of Jurists' Australian chapter, John Dowd QC, said photographic evidence of war crimes in Sri Lanka had been sent to him.
The images showed the execution and degradation of female victims as the bloody fighting in the internal separatist war against the Tamil Tigers came to an end in 2009, and had been sent by an Australian union official two weeks ago, he said.
Dowd said he had sent the evidence to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
"All members of the Commonwealth, if the Commonwealth is going to be taken notice of as a human rights body discussing human rights, should take this fact into account."
An ethnic Tamil living in Australia, Arunachalam Jegatheeswaran, this week tried to launch a war crimes case against Rajapakse in a Melbourne court, but officials quashed the action, citing laws that protect visiting heads of state.
But federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland moved quickly to quash the court action, saying the Foreign States Immunity Act extended immunities granted to diplomatic missions to heads of states.
After Gillard's meeting with Rajapaksa, the prime minister's office said she had asked about progress in Sri Lanka's Lessons Learned And Reconciliation Commission.
She had underlined the importance of this process in addressing allegations of human rights abuses in Sri Lanka at the close of the civil war.
Gillard told reporters before the meeting that Australia took allegations of human rights abuses in Sri Lanka seriously. Earlier, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters in Perth that the next Commonwealth leaders' meeting was set to go ahead in Sri Lanka.
Rudd said that at the last meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, Sri Lanka and Mauritius had been named as hosts for the next two meetings.
"Therefore, it will be a matter for individual governments how they then view matters unfolding in Sri Lanka between now and when that next CHOGM is held," Rudd said.
Some Commonwealth leaders have already made statements on the issue, including the Canadian prime minister, who has called for a boycott of a Sri Lankan CHOGM. Gillard said there were no plans for Australia to boycott the CHOGM in 2013.
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