Why Language Matters
Sri Lanka’s post-colonial language policy was neither fair not desirable. A largely non-English speaking population was governed by a small class of English-speaking elite. Weary of being excluded from governance and public…
Sri Lanka’s post-colonial language policy was neither fair not desirable. A largely non-English speaking population was governed by a small class of English-speaking elite. Weary of being excluded from governance and public…
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…
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…
“I was fascinated with the theme that we must make it happen together, which was perhaps said a countless number of times during your presentation. But Sri Lanka has a problem. We are…
Our country is ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse and our survival depends on equal treatment. Discrimination and violence against Tamils led to civil war and displacement. After the 2019 terrorist attacks, the…
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…
“An alleged former combatant who was “rehabilitated”. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is the armed group that the Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa government claim they defeated in May 2009.…
We will not forget Mullivaikkal, the shot, the strafed, the scissored, and the cluster-bombed. We will not forget holes in roofs, holes in water tanks, holes in heads. We will not…
In Sri Lanka, the challenge to achieve transitional justice lies not in the process alone but also in coming to terms with the ultimate goal. In a post-war context, what is the…
Systematic discrimination and human rights violations against minority communities in Sri Lanka are not new in the country’s political and social realm. The most recent of such violations have been brought to…
Maaveerar Naal, otherwise known as Heroes day, is celebrated on November 27 to remember those who lost their lives fighting for the LTTE. While this day has come to be a highly…