Search Results for: Sri Lanka war crimes

In the summer of 1983, ethnic violence swept the island nation of Sri Lanka. Known as Black July, the outbreak of communal violence between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority communities left thousands dead and hundreds missing. Four decades later, the legacy of the violence lives on, searing Sri Lanka‘s social and political landscape. This [...]

Four Sri Lanka activist organizations accused former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Thursday of obstructing police investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he served as a military officer during a Marxist rebellion in 1989. Activist groups the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), the Center for Human Rights and Development, Journalists [...]

For years, Sri Lanka has occupied the international spotlight for one of its contentious laws—the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). The PTA was introduced in 1979 during the Sri Lankan Civil War using the emergency law provisions in Part II of the Public Security Ordinance. While similar laws exist in other nations, showing widespread acceptance [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) Friday condemned Sri Lanka’s proposed Anti-Terrorism Act, arguing that it would allow authorities to systematically violate fundamental human rights. HRW recommended that the government withdraw the bill until it can properly uphold international human rights standards. The current format of the bill, intended to replace the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act, [...]

The Canadian government announced Tuesday that it had placed sanctions on four Sri Lankan officials, including former Presidents Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Mahinda Rajapaksa, in response to the Sri Lankan government’s crackdown on human rights during the Sri Lankan civil war between 1983 and 2009. The sanctions impose restrictions under Section 2 of the Special Economic [...]

A human rights group Sunday filed a criminal complaint with the attorney general of Singapore, accusing former Sri Lankan President Nandasena Gotabaya Rajapaksa of perpetrating war crimes and human rights violations during the country’s civil war. Rajapaksa fled to Singapore earlier this month as Sri Lankans gathered in protest over alleged government corruption and economic [...]

Sri Lankan law students are reporting for JURIST on the situation in that country since mass protests and the physical invasion of the President’s House in Colombo by demonstrators forced the departure and resignation of Sri Lanka’s president and precipitated the imposition of emergency rule. Here, Naveera Perera of CfPS Law School reports from Colombo. [...]

The International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) on Wednesday released a report detailing incidents of torture by Sri Lankan police and military against political prisoners, just days ahead of a UN summit on human rights. The ITJP took statements from 15 ethnic Tamilians who were illegally detained and tortured since the government of former defense [...]

Much controversy surrounds the use of the flags associated with the Sri Lankan people, mainly because they are loaded with ethnic symbolism in a country recovering from a generation-long civil war along ethno-nationalist lines. The flags of concern here all feature big cats as central to their designs. Big cats, wherever they occur, have been [...]

Officials in Sri Lanka announced plans this weekend to ban burqas in public and close more than 1,000 Islamic schools. These policies are the latest in a string of decisions targeting the country’s Muslim minority. Citing national security concerns, Sri Lanka’s public security minister Sarath Weerasekera signed papers for cabinet approval of the ban on [...]