For Families of the Disappeared, the International Community is Their Last Hope
It is a small shed with cement brick walls and an asbestos roof facing a dusty street. Car horns blare and trucks rattle past. Outside on a weedy patch of grass three…
It is a small shed with cement brick walls and an asbestos roof facing a dusty street. Car horns blare and trucks rattle past. Outside on a weedy patch of grass three…
The sentiments are unanimous. Under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidency and government, Sri Lanka’s human rights defenders in the north are being threatened, harassed and intimidated on a scale never experienced before. Interviews…
The Sri Lankan government’s Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) program has invested in bridging former fighters’ transition from wartime to peacetime, but many aspects of the DDR program continued to pose problems…
Pressure on the government is growing in the run-up to a United Nations Human Rights Council session in February-March 2021. People in Sri Lanka, diaspora members, human rights activists and officials and…
Former UN officials and independent experts call on the international community to take immediate steps towards justice and accountability to end Sri Lanka’s cycles of violence. The recently released report on Sri…
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…