By Gehan Gunatilleke. Few would have predicted the results of Sri Lanka’s local government elections in 2018. With the benefit of hindsight, we must now try to understand what happened and why. There are three lessons to be learnt from the results – one lesson for voters, one for the coalition Government, and one […]

By S W R de A Samarasinghe. Last Saturday’s Local Government (LG) Election dealt a stunning blow to President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the two respective political parties, UPFA and UNP, that they lead and paved the way for the major political comeback of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa. The Sri Lanka […]

(Tamil Guardian. 12 Feb,) Sri Lanka’s unity government suffered an electoral blow at local government polls this weekend, just three years after its surprise victory. The Sinhala people renewed their support for the former war-time president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who asked voters to use the polls as a de-facto referendum on the unity government’s constitutional reform process, […]

Mangala Samaraweera. On the 8th of January 2015, fifty one percent of Sri Lankans voted for the vision put forth to them by our unity candidate Maithripala Sirisena: that the time for dictatorship in our country was over, and that those committed to re-establishing democracy in Sri Lanka must unite to ensure that government serves […]

Image: JVP general secretary Tilvin Silva. (LT/12 Feb 2018) “The votes for the JVP have increased proportionately as well as quantitatively. JVP Members have been elected towards that had never had a JVP Member. Several JVP Members have been elected to almost every council. There are certain councils in which five or six JVP Members […]

Rohan Samarajiwa. The perception is that former President Rajapaksa’s SLPP won a great victory; that the UNP did not do as well as expected and President Sirisena’s attempt to consolidate his position in the SLFP has failed. President Sirisena’s decision to lead the SLFP’s campaign in elections for the lowest level of government has diminished […]

Image: Rajapaksa still to reach his 2015 vote count. ECONOMYNEXT – President Maithripala Sirisena’s uneasy coalition faced a major internal crisis amid finger pointing for the humiliating shock defeat at local government elections, political sources said. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe whose United national Party (UNP) performed poorly was also under pressure to accept responsibility for […]

Angered by a public death threat against Tamil demonstrators in London, Eelamist diaspora groups in a rare display of solidarity have urged the British government to strip Sri Lanka’s military attaché in the United Kingdom of his diplomatic status and declare him a “Persona non Grata”. Leading Tamil diaspora organisations spurred into action by Minister […]

Image: The symbol of Civil Security Division’s Seva Vanitha Unit on the   ‘uniforms’  given to  military run pre-school children in Vanni.  In its Concluding observations on the combined fifth and sixth periodic reports of Sri Lanka United Nations Child Rights Committee  wants the government to ensure that all schools currently run by the military are […]

Government institutions have engaged in continuous “window dressing” of financial records to underreport national debt and bypass borrowing limits imposed by debt management regulations, Auditor General Gamini Wijesinghe revealed yesterday. Taking the balance sheet of the Finance Ministry as an example, Wijesinghe said data presentation has been manipulated to avoid presenting the total amount under […]

6th February 2018 – Statement of the Right to Information Commission, Sri Lanka. In the past one year following the operationalizing of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, No 12 of 2016, Sri Lanka’s first Right to Information Commission records a noteworthy increase in the numbers of appeals being filed before the Commission with information being […]

Eranda Ginige. The real meaning of independence is the freedom we the people of this land gained from the British Empire. What we must really celebrate is the victory of democracy over monarchy. The rule of the people over the rule of kings and queens. The rule by the people over the rule by a […]

Image: Lankan STF ( Special Task Force) soldiers take part in rehearsals for the 70th Independence Day celebrations at the Galle Face Green,Colombo, Sri Lanka on Wednesday 31st January 2018. (January 31, 2018 Lizenz) February 3, 2018 Honorable Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, High Commissioner for Human Rights Office of the United Nations, On February 4 Sri Lanka […]

Sri Lanka Brief Update/ 05 Feb 2018:  Sri Lanka Local Authority Election  2018: Stats, Actors, Issues and Prospects . Stats Local authority elections will be held on the 10th February 2018, in the 341 Local Authorities of Sri Lanka (that consists of 24 municipal councils, 41 urban councils and 276 divisional councils). 15.8 million Sri Lankans […]

1 February, 2018: Leaders in health, politics and development have accepted to participate in the first-ever WHO Independent Global High-level Commission on Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs), which aims to identify and propose bold and practical ways to curb the world’s leading causes of death and illness. The Commission was announced in 2017 by Dr Tedros Adhanom […]

The Office on Missing Persons (OMP) is one of the four mechanisms that the government promised in its ‘comprehensive approach to dealing with the past’. While the OMP is the only mechanism on which any formal progress has been made in the 28 months that have passed since the government announced its plan; even this […]

A retired IGP is among the number of police officials are tipped to be arrested over the killing of Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickeremathunge, reports state controlled Daily News. Further the report hints that former strong man Gotabhaya Rajapaksa aslo will be questioned regarding the missing diary of the murdered editor. The report follows: The […]

R. Sampanthan. With gratitude to our forefathers who fought for independence, I issue this message on 70th Independence Day of our Country. We are at a crucial juncture of our history as we celebrate seventy years of Independence. As a country, we have not been able to enjoy the true benefits of the independence in […]

Image: Anton Balasingham of the LTTE and then Foreign Minister G. L. Peiris at peace talks.  The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) in its manifesto for the forthcoming local government election said that that the solution it seeks with regard to the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka was similar to what was in the Oslo Declaration. This was […]

Meera Srinivasan. Local government elections this month will have a bearing on the coalition government in Colombo. Sri Lanka’s local government elections, scheduled to be held on February 10, have elicited the interest of a national election, and with good reason. This is the first time the country will go to the polls in about […]