The Governor of the Central Bank was summoned to the Bribery Commission and grilled for six hours. A three-month travel banwas imposed on him. That one incident demonstrates how far we have progressed since January 8th.
The journey away from Rajapaksa Rule towards democracy, accountability and the rule of law has been far from perfect; it has […]

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 […]

Gagging the media
The full extent of the outrage committed in Weliweriya unfolds slowly but surely, in spite of crude attempts to gag the
media. Grisly details continue to emerge from the countless testimonies of the bereaved, the assault victims, their relatives and the rest of the community. It’s unlikely that dozens of village people would […]

18th July 2013
It is reliably learnt that the government is in the process of instituting criminal prosecution against the CJ, Shirani Bandaranayake shortly. The recommencement of the hate campaign against her in the state media is an indication of this intended action. The state media is known to be operating in close collaboration with all […]

Letter to Independent Television Network (ITN)
 
Mr. Rosmand Senaratne,
Chairman,
Independent Television Network (ITN),
Wickramasinghepura,
Battaramulla.
 
16 July 2013
 
Dear Mr. Senaratne,
 
I am writing with reference to the Sinhala language 7 pm news broadcast of the Independent Television Network (ITN) on Sunday 14th July 2013.
 
An item on this news bulletin stated that the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) and I, organised a […]

THE INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT AGAINST ALL FORMS OF DISCRIMINATION AND RACISM (IMADR) Japan has condemned
roundly the harassment of a Sri Lankan Human Rights Defender Dr. Nimalka Fernando by Sri Lankan Embassy staff in Tokyo. Fernando was heckled and interrupted during a seminar lecture delivered by her . Embassy staff also followed her and tried to intimidate and threaten […]

“That is a slave’s lot – not to be able to speak one’s mind” — Euripides (Ion)
In Turkey, an attempt to uproot a public park and build a shopping mall ignited a tidal-wave of protests which is yet to abate.
No balls to stand up an condemn
In Saudi Arabia, innumerable Islamic sites are being annihilated in […]

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 […]

At the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in May 2009, many hoped that this would represent a sharp break with the past and usher in a new period of media freedom. However, as the BBC Tamil Service producer Swaminathan Natarajan shows, such hopes have proved ill-founded.
For his research paper,Media Freedom in post-war […]

Great firewall of China
You’ve probably heard of the Great Firewall of China, which scrubs the web of any potentially subversive content for half a billion internet users. And you’ve definitely heard about the Egyptian government’s decision to switch off all internet and mobile-phone networks at the height of the uprising in 2011. But there are […]