ISS

Minister for External Affairs, G.L. Peiris announced that J. S. Tissainayagam was pardoned on May 3. As his lawyer, what is your opinion about the pardon?

Minister of External Affairs Prof. G. L Peiris announced that J. S. Tissainayagam will be pardoned by the president on May 3, on World Press Freedom Day. I don’t think that the government will go back on its word but so far the pardon has not been granted officially and we have not been consulted yet. So I will not and I cannot comment much on this development until he is officially pardoned.
He is on bail right now and we had to remove the appeal so that he can be pardoned. We will start discussing the terms of this pardon with the Attorney General’s Department in the coming days.

It’s called strategic decisions. Politics, war essentially has no principles. Funny you should mention SF, he was a prime example of what I just said. Don’t be so naive. Heshan once justified dropping not ONE! but TWO! nukes on Japan was justified by the lives saved – mind you the Allied lives saved. Using similar sort of logic, one can argue, Karuna’s defection helped save vast amounts of lives, especially among Eastern Tamil youth and SLA soldiers. Is that not something worthy of praise? Sure he killed many Sinhala soldiers, Tamil youth, other innocent people. Sure that makes your blood boil but this is about the game in the long run. You cannot get your dead back but you can save the ones that are alive. People who hold deep grudges can never win. If we stuck to principles and eliminated everyone in the path who deserved it, we would have failed miserably. But we did get the ones that mattered a lot.

Difference? Karuna was helping the goal, Tissa wasn’t and neither is SF now!

Politicians are known to sell their souls for prestige and prominence. No other leader in SL politics had stooped this low. Gone are the days when we had politicians who forfeited their personal wealth to champion causes near and dear to their heart. It is a sad day in history when we have politicians who would squander public wealth to entrench themselves in power and to hell with masses and their priorities who in their blind obescience voted these jokers into power.

“Some believe accepting such a pardon implicitly constitutes an admission of guilt, so in some cases the offer is refused (cases of wrongful conviction are nowadays more often dealt with by appeal than by pardon).”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon

i never said he won’t be released or not.. all i said was if he accepts the pardon, my take is that it is an admission of guilt.

i mean the debate over there right now is whether they should grant miranda rights to one of their own citizens who is accused of terrorism (human rights 101 FAIL!). lol.. clearly they’re in a moral position to judge others who deal with their terrorists right.. go nuts! have tissa.. its a very little thing you can do to give us peace of mind.

every time someone else (fashionable outsiders who wants to butt in from time to time.. u know like miliband and co… whom last time i checked can’t even appease their own country men.. lol) wants to judge our sovereign decisions, we should tell them.. really??? do you wanna have say in this matter? which btw is non of your freaking business? oh my! i see… you’re very passionate about this aren’t you? why the hell don’t you take them then.. HERE! solved!

“and if tissa is a man with any principle then if he accepts the pardon, it is an admission of guilt.”

Not really. Even if Tissa rejects the pardon he’ll be released. You don’t really get the option of accepting or rejecting the pardon.

To have 36 journalists murdered since Richard de Soysa was dragged out of his house in 1990 by armed gunmen and his body dumped on the beach for sending footage of nearly 70,000 JVP youth killed by the UNP in a three year reign of terror to IPS, the successive governments have learnt to terrorise independent journalists and suppress their freedom.

Admittedly some journalists who are not under threat for their reporting or writings do take the opportunity given to genuine persecuted journalists by other countries and seek asylum under false pretences.

Were it not for honest and independent journalists many of the governments’ corruption, human rights violations, nepotism would not have been exposed.

These journalists have more patriotism than sycophants and chauvinists.

The fact that Tissanayagam had been convicted, under dubious circumstances (confessions etc) of offences under misguided anti-terrorism legislation is a sad indictment of the state of affairs in Sri Lanka. The classic case of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The Sri Lankan judicial system is overwhelmed by the huge number of manifestly unjust prosecutions that are intended solely as a means of cowing anyone who dares oppose the government. Any impartial judge is rendered impotent in the face of government delaying tactics that are designed to prolong unjust imprisonments under draconian laws.

Any journalist will no doubt have the honour of entering the government blacklist of “enemies of the state, especially the ones who dare question the regime.

What is it about repressive regimes that make them so sensitive to contsructive criticism?

Do the Rajapakse Brothers think that they can continue with this repression and just listen to their lackeys who would not dare draw attention to the Emperor’s new clothes (or glaring lack of them, in this case ) ?