EU closes door on trade preferences after Sri Lanka silence (Roundup)

Jul 5, 2010, 14:41 GMT

Brussels - The European Union's executive on Monday closed the door on hopes to extend Sri Lanka's access to a preferential trading scheme as officials said Colombo had failed to respond to proposals on human rights.

The move meant that Sri Lanka will have its membership in the EU's enhanced Generalized System of Preferences (GSP+) suspended on August 15. The European Commission had offered to keep Sri Lanka in the system in return for promises on human-rights issues.

'We very much regret the choice of Sri Lanka not to take up an offer made in good faith,' the EU's top diplomat, Catherine Ashton, said in a statement. '... We will, however, keep the door open for Sri Lanka to return to talks.'

Sri Lanka had rejected the EU conditions, saying they were an interference into its internal affairs and would require withdrawing some national security regulations.

Sri Lanka is to lose trade concessions amounting to an estimated 150 million US dollars annually.

The GSP+ system allows members lower tariffs in return for making commitments to enforce human rights, but in February, EU foreign ministers decided that Sri Lanka had not lived up to its promises, especially in its war against Tamil separatist rebels.

Ministers, therefore, proposed suspending Sri Lanka's GSP+ membership temporarily as of August 15.

However, the commission, the EU's executive, subsequently said it would propose that the deadline be pushed back for six months if Colombo pledged to deal with 15 human-rights questions.

'The government of Sri Lanka was invited to respond in writing by July 1,' the commission statement said Monday. 'As of today and despite [our] best efforts to secure a different outcome, no official reply has been received from the authorities in Colombo

That leaves the commission 'not in a position' to propose an extension, the statement said.

The move came as relations between the EU and Sri Lanka are strained over the bloody end in May 2009 of the 26-year civil war with the rebels belonging to Sri Lanka's Tamil ethnic minority. In the closing stages of the conflict, the EU urged the Sri Lankan government to show restraint to prevent civilian casualties - calls that were widely interpreted in Sri Lanka as expressing tacit sympathy for the rebels.