The newly appointed Sri Lankan Ambassador to France, with accreditation to Spain and Portugal, and Sri Lanka’s Permanent Delegate to UNESCO, Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka assumed duties at the Embassy in Paris on 17 January 2011.
Speaking on the occasion, the newly appointed Ambassador highlighted the necessity for engagement with French society in the bilateral arena and stressed the importance of a greater degree of cross cultural dialogue in a bid to broaden the existing relations with the countries of accreditation and UNESCO.
Having served as Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative/Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva from 2007 to 2009, Ambassador Jayatilleka is an academic who is an Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), having been Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the ISAS, NUS in 2010.
The winner of a Fulbright Scholarship, he read for his PhD at the Griffith University in Brisbane. A Senior Lecturer at the University of Colombo, Ambassador Jayatilleka was a Visiting Senior Fellow at John Hopkins University, Washington.
Ambassador Jayatilleka has served on several international panels, including the UN Human Rights Council’s Inter Governmental Working Group on the effective implementation of the Durban Declaration which he chaired, in addition to chairing the Governing body of the International Labour Organisation. He was Vice President of the Human Rights Council, and Coordinator of ‘General and Comprehensive Nuclear Disarmament’ of the UN Conference on Disarmament as well as of the Asian Group of UNCTAD.
Ambassador Jayatilleka is the author of ‘Fidel’s Ethics of Violence: The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro’, co-published by Pluto Press, London and the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour (2007).
Embassy of Sri Lanka
Paris
19 January 2011
