Reconvening Parliament as polls postponed
Image courtesy Even for a country that coped with and ended a near thirty year long civil war, the Covid-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge, not merely in the area of…
Year: 2020
Honouring the victims of 21 April 2019 through togetherness and unity
Photo by Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP via NPR Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Easter Sunday attacks, in which eight IS terrorists senselessly murdered 269 Catholic and Christian worshippers and tourists, shattering our…
New life amidst a threat to all life: Easter in retrospect
Image via , by AFP. Last year, suffering and death struck with the arrival of Easter, to plunge us back into Good Friday. Thousands who lost loved ones and limbs were shattered…
Free Expression, Hunger and Racism in context of COVID19
Image by Nicolas Ortega via On 9th April, hundreds of people in Doluwa, in the Kandy district, came to the road demanding food and relief in the context of the three-week-long indefinite…
Easter Sunday Attacks: Phobias, Prejudices, and a Paradox
The Easter Sunday attacks were brutal and unprecedented. It surfaced communal prejudices and certain phobias that Sri Lankan society lives with. There is a paradoxical narrative that may help us understand some…
Dignity in death, as in life: For everyone including Muslims
Image courtesy Quartz India It is with heavy hearts that we have listened to and observed the debates on whether or not burials should be permitted for Muslims who succumb to COVID-19…
Parliamentary election 2020 and date of summoning of the new parliament
Photo by AP via ABC News I refer to the ’s two pieces yesterday on the same topic. I am in “Lockdown” in Jaffna and write on my own as a Member…
The Rights of Minorities under Extraordinary Circumstances
Image courtesy Quartz India The Muslim community in Sri Lanka has been engaged with the government in a debate to allow persons who died after contracting the coronavirus (COVID-19) to be buried…
A looming constitutional crisis, courtesy Covid-19
Sri Lanka is fighting hard, to the best of all its citizens’ abilities, to deal with the current global pandemic caused by the coronavirus. To its credit, Sri Lanka seems to…
Emerging Governance Issues amid COVID-19
Image courtesy EY As Sri Lanka heads towards completing nearly a month of lockdown, with first the special public holiday route adopted from 16th March and then curfew from 20th March onwards,…
The President in the Pandemic
Photo courtesy NewsInAsia “…by tomorrow, everything will already look different; by tomorrow, everything will already feel different.” – Viktor Klemperer () It was October 1348. Bubonic plague, known to posterity as the…
Poignant Short Stories
Image courtesy The following two short stories were sent in by Tara Kumarasinghe. She is “writing on behalf of the ‘invisible demographics’ in an attempt at social commentary to ensure corona doesn’t…
Pardoning Sunil – A response
Two significant incidents took place on 26 March 2020. Sri Lanka recorded 102 confirmed Covid-19 patients; and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa granted a presidential pardon to Sunil Rathnayake, former Army Staff Sergeant and…
Justice in the Time of a Pandemic
‘What physicians say about consumptive illness is applicable here: that at the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognised…
Releasing Prisoners to prevent spread of COVID-19 in prisons
26th March 2020 To: H.E. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka Hon. Jayantha Jayasuriya, Chairman of the Judicial Services Commission, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of…