Posts Categorized: Human Rights

Building Credible Mechanisms for Domestic Accountability and Transitional Justice

However, given the Sri Lankan State’s persistent unwillingness and inability to credibly address impunity, those who wish to see a meaningful process of righting wrongs in Sri Lanka must demand that the Government make tangible commitments and progress towards addressing victims’ demands for justice.

A mere commitment to conduct a credible process without the necessary legal, institutional and policy reforms must not be accepted at face value. This article outlines the key reforms necessary to ensure that the Government’s promise of a credible domestic process results in a break with the past.

An opportune moment for the Government to make these commitments formally may be at the sessions of the Human Rights Council where the report of the international inquiry on Sri Lanka will presented.

HRW: Rajapaksa Legacy of Abuse

by Human Rights Watch, New York, January 29, 2015 The Sri Lankan government stepped up pressure in 2014 on human rights activists and journalists, particularly those urging justice for past war crimes, Human Rights Watch said in its World Report 2015 released today. A new government, elected in January 2015, should order investigations into arbitrary… Read more »

CJP Calls for Release of Prisoners, Accountability and Resettlement

The Commission for Justice & Peace of the Catholic Diocese of Jaffna has called for the release of political prisoners, accountability for those killed or disappeared during the war and for the resettlement of people back in their land, in an open letter to Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena. Writing to the newly elected president,… Read more »

Legal Case of Tamil Genocide

Legal-Case-of-the-Tamil-Genocide_30-December-2014 The Legal Case of the Tamil Genocide January 6, 2015 by UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic Leave a Comment Full PDF version available here By UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic The UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic, an impact litigation clinic of American University Washington College of Law, has advocated and litigated… Read more »

Helping Sri Lanka’s New Democracy

Sri Lanka’s voters shocked themselves and the world this month by tossing out their president, who crushed the Tamil insurgency in 2009 and then led the country, along with his brother as defense secretary, to the brink of authoritarianism. The new president has promised to restore freedom of the press, independence of judges, and the… Read more »

Amnesty USA’s HR Concerns

http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/sri-lanka Sri Lanka Human Rights Human Rights Concerns Sri Lanka’s brutal 26-year civil war between the government forces and separatists from the Tamil minority ended with a government victory in May 2009. During the war, both sides committed gross human rights abuses, including war crimes, for which no one has been held accountable. Enforced disappearances… Read more »

No Justice for Kumar Ponnambalam

No justice for assassinated human rights lawyer Kumar Ponnambalam, 15 years on Fifteen years after Kumar Ponnambalam, a prominent human rights lawyer and leader of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) was assassinated in a busy Colombo suburb during Chandrika Kumaratunge’s government, his killers have not been brought to justice. Mr Ponnambalam, who was renowned… Read more »

A Century of Silence

by Raffi Khatchadourian, ‘The New Yorker,’ January 5, 2015 …The news of the city’s changed atmosphere came quietly, five or six years ago, with the unlikely talk that Sourp Giragos was going to be rehabilitated as a functioning church—even though there was no congregation for it anymore. Then, in 2011, an item in the Armenian… Read more »

No Fire Zone Campaign

Holding the Sri Lankan government accountable for war crimes during a hidden war by No Fire Zone film producers, UK, December 1, 2014 No Fire Zone campaign December 2014 The final awful months of the Sri Lankan Civil War, told by the people who lived through it. Director Callum Macrae, Outsider Films Trailer: https://youtu.be/JKsp0pAQqvo?si=cDnA3vf5bE3PivZx 50… Read more »

Cosmetic Fixes

by Taylor Dibbert, ‘Foreign Policy,’ Washington, DC, October 31, 2014 SOUTH ASIA Sri Lanka’s twenty-six-year civil war was a brutal conflict that pitted the Sri Lankan government forces against the Tamil Tigers, a group that fought for a separate state in the country’s northern and eastern provinces. Though the government defeated the Tamil Tigers in… Read more »

CBK Waged ‘Mother of All Wars’ – Rev. Dr. Emmanuel

Last week, The Island partly dealt with Rev. Dr. S. J Emmanuel’s thoughts on the collapse of talks between the government of the then President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and LTTE leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, in April 1995. The priest blamed Mrs. Kumaratunga for the breakdown of talks. Rev. Dr. Emmanuel’s views, on the conflict, are relevant,… Read more »

The Road to Justice

by Committee to Protect Journalists, New York, October 28, 2014 The lack of justice in hundreds of murders of journalists around the world is one of the greatest threats to press freedom today. While international attention to the issue has grown over the past decade, there has been little progress in bringing down rates of… Read more »

Amnesty: UN Review Highlights

by Amnesty International, London, October 30, 2014 Amnesty UN review AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC STATEMENT Index: ASA 37/014/2014 30 October 2014 Sri Lanka: UN review highlights ongoing human rights abuse and impunity The UN Human Rights Committee review of Sri Lanka has once again highlighted the vast disconnect between Sri Lanka’s promises to Sri Lankan citizens… Read more »

Media Freedom in Sri Lanka

Watch this powerful talk by Lukshmee Saravanapavan on media freedom in Sri Lanka at  the Amnesty International USA conference in St. Louis, Missouri on Oct. 25. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152822022459948&set=vb.682819947&type=2&theater or  http://youtu.be/a72EU396Z_I —————- For more information on Amnesty’s concerns in Sri Lanka, please visit www.amnestyusa.org/srilanka

Sri Lanka: Where Disappearances Served as a National Security Imperative

Thomson-Senanayake’s study explores these historical fault-lines through the manner in which disappearances served as an integral part of a system of state power and patronage during 1971-2002, ‘to enable the political elite to immobilise all political opposition.’ This is a reading of history which peels away the skin of ideological preoccupations and exposes the truth for what it is, simply a ruthless appropriation of ancient mistrusts and convenient mythologies to serve the political purposes of governments and oppositions.

Compilation of all NESoHR Reports 2005 – 2009

by NorthEast Secretariat for Human Rights, 2014 NESoHR-Compilation-of Human Rights Reports With-Page-Numbers 2005 to 2009 http://nesohr.org/nesohr-reports-2005-2009-january/ In this current climate of investigation by the OHCHR on Sri Lanka, the NESoHR reports issued during the period from 2005 till January 2009 is here republished as a single file for ease of access. These reports were written… Read more »

Deadly Alliances Against Muslims

On his 79th birthday in July, the Dalai Lama appealed to Buddhist extremist groups in Myanmar and Sri Lanka to stop instigating attacks against Muslim minorities that have killed scores. Instead, in an affront to Buddhism’s core message of compassion, leaders of those groups announced an alliance to make common cause against Muslims. “The time… Read more »