The AHRC has issued an urgent public appeal asking people to write to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse and other officials and urge the government to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes.
The need for urgent ratification was highlighted by the four Sri Lankans who were beheaded recently and the teenager Rizana Nafeek facing the death sentence for killing a child in Saudi Arabia, it said in a statement.
"The beheading the four Sri Lankan earlier, the situation faced by Rizana Nafeek at present, and many other persons in many places in the Middle East in particular, raises the need for protective measures to be taken. One such measure is the signing of this particular protocol."
Ratification of the protocol and would make available to the government provisions for intervening on behalf of Sri Lankans on