“Sri Lanka has the world’s second-highest number of cases registered with the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Since the 1980s, an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 people from all…
Another year, another pre-Geneva scramble. At the brink of economic collapse and desperate to maintain GSP+ trade status with the EU, the Sri Lankan government finally feels the heat. Enough, that is,…
While Sri Lanka grapples with an inevitable economic meltdown, the international community has not forgotten the country’s obligations to move towards a reconciled society through the process of transitional justice. One of…
Desmond Tutu was a black, South African, Christian male but in a world where colour, caste, class, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, sexuality and gender matter, he transcended all of that to be a…
In December 2008, Human Rights Office Kandy (HROK) had started to present human rights awards during the celebration of International Human Rights Day. I was among those who received an award and…
Thanks to archaic, Victorian-era laws that are still present in Sri Lanka, the country’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer/Questioning (LGBTIQ) community has been marginalised and discriminated against for over a…
As the world marks Human Rights Day, two years of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidency and over one year of his government have seen Sri Lanka slide rapidly down the slippery slope to…
There is a bagful of tricks that Sri Lankan governments have been using when it comes to the issue of revealing the truth and providing justice to the families of the disappeared….
It was a horrifying and sickening case. A 15 year old child was groomed online and sexually abused by dozens of men including a local government politician, a Buddhist monk, a Navy…
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s visit to Scotland for an international environmental summit put the regime’s grim human rights track record in the spotlight. Failure to care for the environment has already been noted….
November 2 is the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in 2020 at least 22 journalists were murdered in retaliation for…
Every week a journalist is killed. Killing the truth is the world’s safest crime; in eight out of ten cases the killers go free. Since 1992, more than 1,400 journalists have been killed around…
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s maiden speech to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September this year contained several ambitious statements. In particular, the following lines in his speech raised the hopes of…
When Ajantha Ranaweera was ten years old, his brother who was in the army went missing in action. Several years later, he was declared dead. There were no remains. On that day in…
The proposed Code of Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Bill to amend the Code of Criminal Procedure Act No. 15 of 1979 will open up a Pandora’s box of serious abuses. In essence what…
