looking at "creative and innovative ways" to break the impasse over Sri Lanka. Noam Chomsky and Jan Egeland At a 2009 United Nations forum on R2P, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine established by the UN in 2005, Noam Chomsky said: ...What happened in Sri Lanka was a major Rwanda-like atrocity, in a different scale, where the West didn't care. There was plenty of early warning. This [conflict] has been going on for years and decades. Plenty of things could have been done [to prevent it]. But there was not enough interest. Chomsky was responding to a question that referred to Jan Egeland, former head of the UN's Humanitarian Affairs' earlier statement that R2P was a failure in Sri Lanka. Lord Naseby In 2017, Lord Naseby asked the British Parliament to remove war crimes allegations and said: ...UK must now get the UN and the UNHCR in Geneva to accept a civilian casualty level of 7,000 to 8,000, not 40,000. UK will recognize the truth that no one in the Sri Lankan Government ever wanted to kill Tamil civilians. He went on to state: I have discovered an unpublished report from the United Nations country team, which stated that from August 2008 up to 13 May 2009, the number of civilians killed was 7,721. The war ended six days later, so it cannot possibly have got up to 40,000. However, human rights groups accuse Lord Naseby of purposely distorting a snapshot of figures gathered by the UN in 2009, which contradict the later and more thorough investigation undertaken by the United Nations panel in 2011 which found that as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians may have been killed in the final months of the civil war. In 2014, the Daily Telegraph's chief political commentator Peter Oborne described Lord Naseby as an apologist for the Sri Lankan government, who had given misleading and inaccurate statements about the war, and who had received hospitality from the Sri Lankan government. Human Rights Watch On 30 October 2020, Human Rights Watch criticized the United Nations for aiding the government of Sri Lanka to repair its disgraced image. At a special event held in Sri Lanka to commemorate UN's 75th birthday, the world body honored one of the suspected architects of war crimes in the country. Mahinda Rajapaksa, the president in power at the time of civil war in the country, attended the UN event as