Sri Lanka resumes deportation of asylum seekers
Photograph courtesy “Please save my family, please” was the message I received from a Pakistani friend last weekend. It was about her family of seven, including 3 children, who had fled Pakistan…
Author: Ruki Fernando
Death Penalty: License for Judicial Killings
Last year, on October 2, Iran executed a 24-year-old woman, Zeinab Sekaanvand, who was a child at the time of her alleged offense. Under international law, she should have been excluded from…
World Refugee Day and Refugees in Sri Lanka
June 20 is World Refugee Day, coinciding with a time Sri Lanka faces its most serious refugee crisis since 2014. Though not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967…
Refugee crisis in Sri Lanka after the Easter Sunday bombings
Photo courtesy Gemunu Amarasinghe/Associated Press via “Pakistanis a country where suicide bombings happen on a regular basis, mobs gather and kill minorities and people who think differently, houses and settlements are attacked,…
Keppapulavu: Land Struggle Reaches Boiling Point after 700 days of protest
700 days is a long time for a day and night protest outside an Army camp. Since March 1, 2017, the people of Keppapulavu, located in the Mullaitheevu district in Northern Sri…
The Struggle for Justice
Editor’s Note: Dear friends, I want to congratulate the Law and Human Rights Centre for organising this course. It is difficult but very important to do this in Jaffna, a place that…
Freedom of Expression on the decline in Sri Lanka
The last twelve months, since World Press Freedom day 2017, has not been a good year for freedom of expression in Sri Lanka. The war ravaged North bore the brunt of repression,…
Iranaitheevu: a community reclaims their island home from the Navy
On the morning of April 23, 2018, about 300 people from the Iranaitheevu twin islands decided to sail there in about 40 boats. They have been displaced since 1992, and the Navy…
Iranaitheevu; a year of continuous protests to regain Navy-occupied land
After the election of the new government in 2015, the people of Iranaitheevu, forcibly displaced since 1992, finally thought they would be able to return home. Yet a flurry of letters and…
Crippling civic organising, mobilising and resistance through Draft Amendment to the Act on NGOs
On February 20, 2018, the Cabinet decided to publish the repressive Draft Act to Amend the Voluntary Social Service Organizations (Registration and Supervision) Act no. 31 of 1980 (LDO 32/2011) to a gazette and…
STF brutality against Muslims in Digana: March 5
As Sinhalese – Buddhist mobs were escalating violence against Muslims around Digana on March 5, the Hijrapura mosque in Digana had just finished afternoon prayers around 4 pm that day. As usual,…
366 days – Roadside Protests in Kilinochchi
366 days (as of 20th Feb) is a long time to be at a 24 hour roadside protest. That’s how long Tamil families of disappeared in Kilinochchi have been there. In the…
Ekneligoda, Sugirtharajan and 24th January
For several years, the Free Media Movement (FMM) of Sri Lanka and free expression advocates have dubbed January as “Black January”. This was in the context of a large number of journalists…
Mary’s Consent for Jesus’s birth: A Christmas reflection
Image courtesy Wikipedia Christmas is the story of Mary, a young unwedded mother, giving birth to a refugee child, Jesus, in a sheep shed. The central male character in this story is…
“We vehemently refuse to be deceived again”: Protests by families of disappeared, continuing abductions and empty promises
Photography from Above was the last line in a press release issued on 17th August, by Association for Relatives for Enforced Disappeared in Kilinochchi district, at a press conference in Colombo. It…