Amnesty International Press Release: The Sri Lankan Government has launched a renewed crackdown on dissent that is severely curtailing civil society freedom and obstructing efforts to deliver justice for conflict-era crimes under…
On 11 February 2010, Pattani Razeek, a former Grama Niladhari (Village Official), a former Managing Trustee of the Community Trust Fund (CTF) and an Executive Committee Member of the Asian Forum for…
The recent coup in Myanmar has created an interest in looking into the impact of military rule that began with the 1962 coup and continued up to 2011. Burma (now Myanmar) was…
Why do Sri Lankan human rights advocates repeatedly place their trust in an imperfect and highly politicised inter-state human rights mechanism year after year? For many of us working in the domain…
The transitional justice process in Sri Lanka has come to a grinding halt. Reconciliation between the majority and minority communities has never before seemed such a distant dream as the government goes…
Photo courtesy of Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect International and local human rights advocates urged the UN Human Rights Council’s Core Group for Sri Lanka not to be fooled into presenting a…
The Sri Lankan government is likely to face an uncomfortable time at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) session in February-March 2021. Strong criticism can be expected, in the light of…
I put on a shirt today with red and blue stripes bordering a sea of white, and wrapping my legs a pair of blue jeans, my hair black as crows that…
Photo courtesy of InfoLanka Kanagasabai Thevathasan is a 64-year-old prisoner I met while I was at the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka. Twelve years have passed since he was arrested, more…
We watched the film, Funny Boy, directed by Deepa Mehta and adapted from Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel, twice. We were surrounded by the numerous debates and controversies about the film. The first…
The propagation of extremism, the political patronage it receives and the fueling of division in society by extremist elements and their actions is the very antithesis of democracy and democratic principles. Extremist…
“An alleged former combatant who was “rehabilitated”. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is the armed group that the Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa government claim they defeated in May 2009.…
In Sri Lanka, the challenge to achieve transitional justice lies not in the process alone but also in coming to terms with the ultimate goal. In a post-war context, what is the…
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Systematic discrimination and human rights violations against minority communities in Sri Lanka are not new in the country’s political and social realm. The most recent of such violations have been brought to…
