100 days in hard labour and counting: The plight of J.S. Tissainayagam
Repost This ArticleToday is Human Rights Day, which honours the UN’s adoption and proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on 10 December 1948, the first global enunciation of human rights.
Today is also the one hundredth day Tamil journalist J.S. Tissanaiyagam will spend imprisoned doing hard labour. He has already spent over six hundred days in prison. On 31 August 2009, Tissa was sentenced by the High Court in Colombo to an incredible twenty years of rigorous imprisonment under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). Nimalka Fernando, a leading human rights activist, called the judgement a travesty of justice, a position Groundviews unequivocally endorsed and associates itself with. As the eminent International Commission of Jurists noted, Tissa’s case,
“…raises a number of concerns regarding fair trial standards, including the judge’s interlocutory decision to allow into evidence what counsel for Mr Tissainayagam described as a forced confession, and subsequent denial of the accused’s right to appeal this decision. The [ICJ] also expressed concern that Judge Wijesundara is the sister of the officer who signed the Indictment against Mr. Tissainayagam.”
The report went on to say that,
“Criminalizing written expression without evidence of resulting violence, equating terrorism with an intention to cause feelings of ill will, stripping accused persons of basic rights, admitting into evidence confessions while in police custody and shifting the burden to the accused to prove coercion, mandating harsh minimum sentences – all of these factors pose a threat to the rights of citizens to express controversial views, a pillar of a law-based democratic society.”
When Groundviews first flagged Tissa’s case, we noted that,
“Salient points of Tissa’s case point to a larger and more chilling deterioration of media freedom in Sri Lanka under the Rajapakse administration.”
In May 2009, President Barack Obama referred to Tissa as an emblematic example of the distressing reality of journalist’s jailed for their writing. Late November, it was reported in web media that President Obama wrote “an urgent letter to the President Mahinda Rajapakse for the release of Senior Journalist Tissainayagam”. Further, the US State Department suspected the imprisonment to be politically motivated, as noted in the recent report on Sri Lanka by the US Committee on Foreign Relations. Many in Sri Lanka concur. In her statement, Ms. Navanethem Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at the 12th session of the Human Rights Council said,
“We should all be dismayed by the recent sentence of twenty years’ imprisonment imposed on Sri Lankan journalist J.S. Tissainayagam, who had been critical of the army’s treatment of Tamil civilians. His conviction raises serious concerns about respect for the right to freedom of expression.”
Yet no amount of domestic and international pressure and condemnation seems able to get Tissa out of prison. As this site noted previously, Tissa’s case is more than a set of ludicrous charges against an individual leading to detention, torture, arrest and imprisonment. The conduct of the case, the legal and the evidentiary basis of the judgement, the length of time Tissa was interrogated in prison without any charge, the inhuman manner in which he was treated, the enforced confession and his miserable fate today are all carefully engineered to generate fear and anxiety amongst other independent journalists and media. In this, the Rajapakse regime has been tremendously successful.
Revealingly, the most compelling article we have published on Tissa’s plight comes from a staunch supporter of President Rajapakse and the war against the LTTE. Read nearly six thousand times to date, Sandun Ratnaweera’s The sentencing J.S Tissainayagam: Not in my name! poses a pertinent question,
“I heard today that Daya Master the LTTE Media head had been released on bail and that according to the Daily Mirror the CID found that they had committed “no crime under the prevention of terrorism act.” If Daya Master, whose only livelihood for the last 30 years was blatant LTTE propaganda and who obviously drew a pay check from the LTTE every month is, in the eyes of our courts, not guilty of any crime under the PTA, I am really at a loss to understand the sentence handed down to Tissainayagam.”
To date, the regime has no answer.
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Other cogent articles on Tissanaiyagam published on this site include:
- The Case of Tissainayagam: Who is on Trial? by Surendra Ajit Rupasinghe
- A former Editor and senior journalist on the sentencing of J.S. Tissainayagam
- NORMALISING THE EXCEPTION: THE STATE OF EMERGENCY IN PEACETIME by Publius
- The case of Jaseekaran and the Rule of Law in Sri Lanka by Sunanda Deshapriya
George Bernard Shaw once said, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.” (Remember Lasantha?). One is also reminded of words of the 19th century poet Heinrich Heine who said, “Whenever books are burnt, men also, in the end are burnt.”
The Family Dictatorship of Sri Lanka today is only the latest in a long line of Dictatorships worldwide who have tried to snuff out unpalatable ideas and comments by abducting, intimidating, beating and killing its journalists. J.S.Tissainayagam is one of the many such journalists who has been given a prison sentence of 20 years.
The first recorded victim of censorship was Socrates who, in 399 BC was forced to drink poison for ‘denying the gods and introducing new divinities.’ In China, in 213 BC, Emperor Shih Huang-Ti had all writing not pertaining to agriculture or medicine burnt. His target: Confucius’ thoughts. Present day China is no better.
During the last century, it was the communists who most systematically censored books and hounded their authors. Writers in every communist country from East Germany to Vietnam were forced into concentration camps. Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were just a few. Hitler’s Germany burnt the books of Jewish authors and liberals, exterminating thousands in their notorious gas chambers and forcing others to flee. In Mahinda’s Sri Lanka, over 14 journalist’s, the majority of them tamils have been killed in the past 3 years. Many more journalist’s have been abducted, beaten and intimidated to keep them from writing the truth.
Sometime back the Government blocked access to the Tamilnet, but what the Government does not understand is that with the advance of technology, censorship has become obsolete. The truth is only a click away. All you need to do to read the Tamilnet is to go to a proxy site.
In today’s day and age it is no longer possible to stop the message or the truth getting out by killing or imprisoning the messenger.
If this sorry state of affairs continues, this country will be known the world over as, The Democrazy Theocrazy Banana Republic of Sri Lanka, and the SICK MAN OF ASIA!
Has any journalist, Sri Lankan or international, asked Sarath Fonseka about his thoughts on Tissa and his imprisonment.
Surely, Tissa could be made in to a Presidential election issue.
And while we are at it, why not ask Mr Fonseka about who was behind Lasantha’s murder. At the very least, why not compell Mr Fonseka to commit to a Presidential inquiry if he is voted in! One more for the show…
The time is right to obtain some answer. Where are the journalists?
Reality is he is an ethnically Tamil person that is the fundamental birth wrong in his part.
If he is an ethnically different back round either government or opposition might have little interest
Look the media’s in srilanka, to what extend they worried about this man.
Look the president comment recently relates to Obama’s request. Why he can’t pardon like DIG ‘S wife… etc etc
”If this sorry state of affairs continues, this country will be known the world over as, The Democrazy Theocrazy Banana Republic of Sri Lanka, and the SICK MAN OF ASIA!”
That will take a very long time.
We have created intergovernmental bodies that can oppress the oppressed and ignore the oppression of the oppressors:
i.UN talks only about Israel and
iiCommonwealth talks only about ”military regimes”
Sri Lanka and some others are ”DEMOCRACIES”
It’s extremely difficult to reform the old institutions.
Tissanayagam is in jail for all of us:
He’s directly connected to the ”crime” and all of us are remotely(and ”safely”) connected.
Sri Lanka is on the way to becoming another Myanmar .
@ punitham
not connected at all, in some cases.
You hit the nail on the head.
That’s exactly the “bigger” reason or “root” reason behind many of the nasty stuff going on; i.e., the fact that all of us are (only) “remotely” and “safely” connected – or
We need to open our mouths big time. Support the lawyers, activists, and anyone who is opening their mouths; don’t let them be lone voices in the wilderness whose head are then delivered on a platter to the angry king and his family…
Tissa’s in jail not ‘cos he opened his mouth but ‘cos the rest of us who knwo the truth, did NOT open our mouths at that time. Let that trend stop now.