Free Media Movement (FMM) strongly condemns the inhuman police attack against the students of Higher National Diploma in Engineering (HNDE) who protested asking recognition of HNDE as equivalent to the undergraduate degree and for several other requests, in front of University Grant Commission on 29th October, 2015. FMM considers this attack as a gross violation […]

Statement on the brutal police attack on HND (Higher National Diploma) students on 29/10/2015 by  concerned citizens.Many of us issuing this statement today played an active role in the January 08, 2015 Presidential Election campaign and the subsequent General Election on 17 August. Ours was not a political involvement in the sense of playing party […]

Muslims will be an integral part of the truth, justice, reparations and non-recurrence process and  Muslims’ grievances and concerns will be a part of the consultations, design and operationalization of the domestic mechanisms; including the Commission for Truth, Justice, Reconciliation and Non-recurrence, the Judicial Mechanism, the Office of Missing Persons and the Office of Reparations, […]

Freedom House has just released its latest report on internet freedom. Sixty-five countries were examined for this study. Broadly speaking, things are moving in the wrong direction, with net freedom in decline for the fifth straight year. According to the report, the biggest positive changes have occurred in Zambia and Sri Lanka. For Sri Lanka, […]

( Rohana Wijeweera) Somawansa Amarasinghe, the former leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)  says that  Rohana Wijeweera did not listen to security warnings by politburo members that he should no t go back to his residence just two days before his arrest and death. Amarasinghe says that even today he cannot understand why Wijeweeera took […]

Thank you, Hon. Presiding Member. As I begin, I must put on record and correct certain misapprehensions that some Members seem to be harbouring with regard to our Party’s position in respect of this Resolution. I will read out the statement that we issued on the day the Resolution was adopted. It states, I quote: […]

In a strange turn of events Sri Lanka police, which is entrusted to protect rule of law in the country has asked lawyers not to appear for known criminals, reports Colombo Gazette. This police statement has been  made in the wake of Dunesh Priyashantha, who was arrested and tortured by the police, making a complaint […]

(Ambassador Samantha Power at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit in Mexico City) Finally, I just want to conclude with an example — a very concrete example. In January 2015, the people of Sri Lanka went to the polls to elect a new president. The incumbent Rajapaksa administration had governed largely through divisiveness and fear, […]

Former SriLankan Airlines Chairman Nishantha Wickremasinghe has gone missing according to the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Serious Financial Crimes. A group of commission members who visited Wickremasinghe’s Mount Lavinia residence to deliver summons on him was told by his wife that she had not seen her husband for the past three years. She had […]

(Earlier days KP with Prabhakaran) The Attorney General has filed four reports in Court on the LTTE’s former leader of the International Wing Shanmugam Kumaran Pathmanathan alias KP, as directed by the Court of Appeal consequent to a writ petition filed by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Jayantha Jayasuriya appearing for […]

Though new government offers some hope, say LGBT activists By Kaitlin Bardswich . Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, executive director of Equal Ground in Sri Lanka, says the LGBT-rights organization has come under state security surveillance. / Kaitlin Bardswich “I’m sorry I’m a lesbian,” a Sri Lankan woman says she told her mother, after her sister outed her. […]

Picture courtesy RepublicSquareby Rev. Fr. Elil Rajendram SJ The following is Rev. Fr. Ranjendram’s speech delivered yesterday at the BMICH, commemorating the Day of the Disappeared in Sri Lanka Members of the families of those forcibly disappeared, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank the organising committee for the invitation to deliver this […]

The Police Special Task Force (STF) organized a firearms training session at the Katukurunda Police STF Academy Grounds for newly elected parliamentarians without any knowledge of the Speaker of the parliament according to media reports in Colombo. A senior Police source had told Ceylon Today, that 35 newly elected parliamentarians participated at the training session […]

Surveying the events of the last ten days, it seems to me that the need of the hour is to penetrate the fog of misinformation and fantasy with regard to the consequences of the Geneva Resolution on Sri Lanka, and to make a realistic appraisal of the situation. The point of departure is a clear […]

( Muslim IDPs in Puttalam – Al Jazeera) On the 30th of October 1990 the entire Muslim population of close to 75,000 people living in the North were evicted by the LTTE. It is now 25 years since the Muslim community fled the North fearing for their lives and leaving behind their homes, livelihoods and […]

The 25th year of the mass expulsion of Muslim people resident in the north by the LTTE falls this October.  The eviction of the 90,000 strong northern Muslim population continues to be a humanitarian and political problem of national proportions.  An estimated 80 percent of them continue to live outside their original places of residence. […]

CHENNAI: Former Sri Lankan minister Douglas Devananda is all set to stand trial before a Chennai court through video conferencing from Colombo in 28-year-old murder case. It was in the preceding night of Diwali in 1987 that Douglas and nine other Sri Lankan Tamils were involved in a shootout at Choolaimedu in Chennai. One person […]

By Lacile de Silva. In the past, respective governments appointed different commissions to look into — a crisis in the policing system in 1945; even worse problems in 1970; graver problems owing to severe politicization etc. in 1995. Since the 1970s, the politicians began interfering with the police and created serious law and order issues […]

The Government of Sri Lanka has given green light to Paranagam Commission to investigate the infamous white flag case without establishing a credible domestic Mechanism, according to state controlled Ceylon Daily News. The newspaper quoted Missing Persons chairman P. Paranagama and says that an investigation team of the Commission will be conducting an independent, impartial […]

Leader of the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), one of the constituents of the four party Tamil National Alliance (TNA), and former Jaffna district parliamentarian Suresh Premachandran told the Sunday Observer in a brief interview that the Maxwell Paranagama Commission report that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe tabled in Parliament Tuesday was self-contradictory and held […]

25 years since the eviction of 75,000 Muslims by the Tamil Tigers from Sri Lanka’s North, the livelihood concerns of this marginalised section remain neglected. It is time for the political elite — both Sinhala and Tamil — to probe their own consciences and evolve a more inclusive resettlement framework About 25 years ago, on […]

Previous govt. resisted its own commission Army blamed for withholding findings on C4 charge War Crimes Division proposed for High Court  Anyone refusing to cooperate with the proposed domestic accountability procedures and post-war reconciliation process would face the prospect of losing his or her civic rights according to the Report on the Second Mandate of […]

The recent findings of two inquiry commissions in Sri Lanka underscore the need for a formal process to investigate and prosecute those responsible for grave crimes during the armed conflict that spanned three decades. The submission of the reports in Parliament should be welcomed, although it could also be interpreted as a signal to the […]

In a speech delivered at a Buddhist temple in the capital Colombo, Former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse said he opposed a resolution passed against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. Colombo: Former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse today opposed international war crimes apparatus and urged all parties in the […]

In a wide ranging interview, Human Rights Watch Asian chief Brad Adams says that under Mahinda Rajapaksa, there was only “victor’s justice”, whereas today there appears to be “justice for all communities” Many in the United States administration had resisted the proposal for a resolution on Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council but […]

By Daya Gamage . Garry Anandasangaree, 43, a well-established attorney-at-Law elected to Canadian parliament from Toronto’s Scarborough Rouge Park Riding electoral district in the Canadian Province of Ontario this week to represent the Liberal Party which won almost a landslide in Canada elevating its leader Justin Trudeau as the next prime minister. Sri Lankan expatriate […]

Sri Lanka opted for a domestic mechanism despite the UN rights chief Seid Raad Al Hussein called for a hybrid court to carry out prosecutions into the rights abuse cases. The process to fix accountability as mandated by the latest UNHRC resolution for the alleged rights abuses during the conflict with the LTTE will be […]

I am worried and mad at my Mum. Why is she doing this? Is she insane or greedy? But she says it is foolish to keep something that will be soon taken over by “them”. I cried “Mum it is our home, we have got to keep it for our kids, may be they will […]

(Concluding Remarks made by Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera on October 23rd 2015 in the Parliamentary debate on the resolution on Sri Lanka passed by the UN Human rights Council in Geneva) The national unity government has committed itself to winning the peace, securing the country from political violence that has haunted it since independence and […]

(Colombo) – Sri Lanka’s police forces regularly torture and ill-treat criminal suspects in custody, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. The authorities should create an independent oversight authority and adopt concrete steps to end police abuse that has had such corrosive effects across Sri Lankan society. “The Sri Lankan police treat […]