Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.
A legal definition is found in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
I believe that since independence [Independence from the Colonial Rule of Great Britain was achieved in 1948] the acts perpetrated by the Government of Sri Lanka on the Tamils including the burning down of the Jaffna Library, the refusal to act on the Vattakottai [Vattukottai] resolution, disappearances of Tamil individuals, refusal to allow Tamil to be an official language of Sri Lanka, firing on the so-called "safe zone", the relocation of Tamils and moving in of Sinhalese into traditional Tamil areas, and the use of concentration-style camps for internally displaced Tamils should be classed as Genocide.
I will work with the Tamils to get the acts perpetrated on the Tamils classed legally as a genocide so that the UN Convention can be used to address the problems.
Dr Rachel Joyce
Conservative Parliamentary Candidate, Harrow West