Dr Sara Davies speaks with SBS’s Naomi Selvaratnam about the number of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka.
She says: “It’s not uncommon in a post-conflict situation, particularly in a situation like Sri Lanka where it was a civil war, and where the conflict was in a particular location where there was an ethnic group that was under sustained combat with the government, to then in that post-conflict situation, to no longer feel safe, and to feel that they need to flee and escape. “And it should be remembered too that there were hundreds of thousands of people forcibly displaced and sent to internment camps, and we still don’t have precise numbers about how many were sent to these internment camps. And it is not impossible that these groups are slowly making their way down to coastal lines, to seek a passage, and it takes a lot of time.”
To hear the whole interview including comments from Bala Vigneswaran (spokesman for the Australian Tamil Congress) and Basil Fernando (Asian Human Rights Commission) click here.