Search Results for: sri lanka

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Sunday stated that the Sri Lankan government’s proposed counterterrorism legislation risks a similar oppression to its current abusive law. The bill fails to meet benchmarks for protection of rights set by the UN. According to the rights group, the bill also does not comply with Sri Lanka’s rights obligations made [...]

The Sri Lankan government must take action and accountability for conflict-related sexual violence, Amnesty International said Tuesday following the release of a report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). In a statement, Amnesty International urged the government to “to end impunity and publicly commit to a timeline” for [...]

Cyclone Ditwah exposed Sri Lanka’s catastrophic lack of preparedness. After the first red alerts predicting very heavy rainfall were issued on the night of November 25, Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s public Facebook posts the following day focused on meetings with film producers and Road Development Authority engineers. It was only on the morning [...]

Amnesty International charged on Thursday that governments and the global fashion industry profit from the ongoing abuse of workers’ right to freedom of association in four major garment manufacturing hubs, asserting that this violates international labor rights. The organization based its findings on two reports compiled between September 2023 and August 2024 across 20 garment [...]

Pitasanna Shanmugathas is a third-year student at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law. He has been actively following developments in this discrimination case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. A Canadian Human Rights Tribunal member ruled last week that the government cannot invoke national security laws to indefinitely delay discrimination complaints. The Tribunal decision [...]

A year after the leftist National People’s Power (NPP) coalition won an unprecedented supermajority in Sri Lanka’s November 2024 parliamentary elections—with support from both the majority Sinhala and minority Tamil communities—it has fallen short in terms of delivering on its sweeping promises. As the first party to govern Sri Lanka outside the two-party system, the [...]

JURIST’s Sarisha Harikrishna interviews Professor Dr. John D. Ciorciari, Dean of the Hamilton Lugar School at Indiana University Bloomington on the practical challenges of prosecuting genocide and war crimes in Asia. While international courts have established legal frameworks for addressing mass atrocities, their application in Asia faces distinct obstacles shaped by regional politics and diplomatic [...]

The International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) developed a detailed reparations claim in collaboration with the Valvettithurai Citizens’ Committee to the Sri Lankan Office for Reparations, seeking USD $15 million (LKR 4.5 billion) for victims of a 1989 massacre in the Jaffna peninsula, on Friday, where at least 66 civilians were killed and 34 injured [...]

International human and civil rights groups on Monday urged the UN Human Rights Council to maintain its oversight of the situation in Sri Lanka. The appeal comes ahead of the council’s 60th session, where member states’ compliance with international human rights treaties is to be reviewed. Amnesty International, together with the Asian Forum for Human [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Wednesday that despite promises of reform, Sri Lankan security forces continue to harass the families of enforced disappearance victims, using the country’s counterterrorism laws to stifle justice and accountability. In its statement, the humanitarian organization highlighted that President Dissanayake’s administration, nearly a year into power, has done little to change [...]