07 January 2015
His Excellency Mahinda Rajapaksa
President of Sri Lanka
Presidential Secretariat
Colombo 1
Dear Mr President,
The Importance of January 8th – Lasantha Wickrematunge’s murder
The irony of the presidential election being fixed for the sixth anniversary of the day on which my husband and your ‘friend’, Lasantha Wickrematunge, was assassinated, may have escaped you. It has not escaped me.
Lasantha […]

 
Our correspondent  in Weliweriya and Rathupaswala
“When the army started firing, most of us ran to St Anthony’s Church, Weliweriya. The army then followed us to the church and started firing live ammunition that injured many. Then they threatened the people to kneel down on the church grounds and started assaulting with bicycle chains, clubs and […]

Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama has said the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s refusal to let the
country host records of trial proceedings constitute a betrayal.
Karugarama, who said the trial records are an integral part of Rwanda’s history, told the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday that ICTR has failed to serve its cause.
The ICTR was established […]

“Hitler seemed intent, in fact, on delivering these blows completely in the open so as to leave a deep and abiding impression, as if proclaiming from the rooftops his immutable will….”
– Joachim Fest (Plotting Hitler’s Death)
The end was preordained. The quintessentially Rajapaksa-impeachment produced a
quintessentially Rajapaksa Chief In-justice. Mohan Peiris, the trusted acolyte of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, […]

Four years after the brutal assassination of the Founding Editor-in-Chief of The Sunday Leader newspaper Lasantha Wickrematunge, the police are yet to make a breakthrough and the murderers are roaming free.
Two suspects were arrested following Wickrematunge’s murder – Kandegedara Piyawansha and Pichchai Jesudasan.
Piyawansha, a former military intelligence officer, was released on bail in 2010 after […]

UPDATE:On January 9, 2013, the Saudi Ministry of Interior announced the execution of
Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan domestic worker convicted of killing a baby in her care in 2005 when she was 17 years old.
Human Rights Watch strongly condemns the execution.
“Saudi Arabia is one of just three countries that executes people for crimes they committed […]

Getting away with murder
THERE is little doubt that in 2009 the government of Sri Lanka pulled off one of the nastiest episodes of mass killing since the Rwandan genocide – and got away with it. Tens of thousands of civilians were massacred, with barely a trickle of Syria-like imagery emerging from the battle zone.
In a […]

UN failed
The United Nations failed in its mandate to protect civilians in the last months of Sri Lanka’s
bloody civil war, a leaked draft of a highly critical internal UN report says.
“Events in Sri Lanka mark a grave failure of the UN,” it concludes.
The government and Tamil rebels are accused of war crimes in the brutal […]

Pilloried and praised, congratulated and condemned, Sri Lanka has received a forthright, but divided, assessment of its postwar human rights record.
Sri Lanka, whose 26-year-civil war ended in 2009 with the defeat of the separatist Tamil Tigers,
was excoriated by a swath of countries, including the US, Britain, France and Canada, at the UN Human Rights Commissioner’s […]

Going beyond UNSCR 1325: Post-war Sri Lanka and Women’s ESCR
An Interview with Sithara Shreen Abdul Saroor
United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, adopted 31st October 2000,
reaffirms the role of women in peace and security settings. In this interview Shreen Saroor explores the potential as well as the limitations of UNSCR 1325, especially in context of post war […]