Women in Sri Lanka shun participating in politics for numerous reasons including hostility, harassment, threats, intimidation, violence and personal attacks on all fronts. While women consist 52 percent of the country’s population…
For 25 long years the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Establishment and Maintenance of Places of Unlawful Detention and Torture Chambers at the Batalanda Housing Scheme, better known as…
Although Sri Lanka is a world away from Palestine local activists, motivated by the slaughter and suffering that the Palestinian people are undergoing in their own land each day, are carrying out…
Thousands of people gathered in a hot, dusty field in Mullavaikkal in the Mullaitivu district to mark the end of the bloody civil war on May 19, 2009. The area was dotted…
In October 1990 some 75,000 to 100,000 Muslims in the Northern Province, about five percent of the province’s total population, were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the LTTE. In some places,…
In all conflicts around the world, women are deeply affected. Sri Lanka’s 26 year civil war is no exception. Women in the war torn areas have faced violence, sexual abuse, displacement and…
Artists and writers throughout the ages have depicted the horrors of war in graphic detail in their work. From Wilfred Owen’s poems about World War I to Picasso’s painting Guernica on the…
COVID-19 and the severe economic crisis has resulted in an increase in human smuggling, illegal migration and forced labour in Sri Lanka. People are heavily in debt after taking loans to tide…
A cascade of reports from human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have drawn attention to rise of authoritarian and nationalistic regimes around the world that is having an…
January is usually a grim indication of the perilous state of human rights in Sri Lanka. It is reminder of the many cases that have gone unpunished with perpetrators still at large….
As the world marks another Human Rights Day, Sri Lanka is sinking deeper and deeper into an authoritarian regime where human rights are routinely flouted and international criticism is regularly ignored. The…
They are a small, tight knit community held together by their shared suffering and insurmountable difficulties. Ever since the start of the 1983 civil war, their lives have been marked by tragedy…
Human rights defenders, journalists, families of the disappeared and people remembering their dead are continually being harassed and monitored by intelligence services, military and police in the North. Although the war ended…
Chandrakumari whips out her smart phone and prods it sharply with one finger. She wants to display the website that says Sri Lankan Tamil girls are being held as sex slaves in…
One striking issue is currently polarising society. Should the country forget about demanding system change and accept the status quo for now to get the economy back on track? The argument is…
