International Commission of Jurists .............................................................................................................................................................................................
The impeachment process against Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake ignores international standards and practice, says the ICJ.
The ICJ urges the government of Sri Lanka to take immediate steps to uphold the independence of the judiciary and adhere to international standards and practice on the removal of judges.
Bianca Hall | The Age ............................................................................................................................................................................................. The Refugee Council of Australia's chief executive has called on the government to urgently halt the forced deportation of Sri Lankan asylum seekers.
Paul Power said there was compelling new evidence that members of the group were forcibly returned and denied the opportunity to have their claims for protection assessed. On Thursday, Fairfax Media revealed that members of the group sent back to Colombo and jailed had said the Australian government had not properly investigated their claims for protection.
Police in northern Sri Lanka have made a series of arrests which they say are linked to combating terrorism, three years after the separatist Tamil Tigers were defeated. Up to 25 people are being held, a top official told the BBC. Police are also reportedly hunting several students.
Espousing separatism is illegal in Sri Lanka. Suspects can be held without charge for 18 months.
Sri Lanka's Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake walked out of her impeachment hearing before lawmakers Thursday after complaining she was not being given a fair trial, legal and parliamentary sources said.
The move to impeach Bandaranayake, the country's first female chief justice, came after she scuppered a bill that would have given more powers to President Mahinda Rajapakse's younger brother Basil, who is economic development minister.
Anumber of years ago, I had an interesting conversation with a Myanmar monk who serves as a good example of the young and savvy face of Buddhism in the country today. As zealous about politics and technology as he is the tenets of his religion, he is a prolific blogger on political, religious and social issues.
Having corresponded with him for many months, I finally had a chance to meet with him at his monastery, and we discussed Myanmar’s ethnic politics during a tea-fuelled session lasting the better part of a day.
By Shihar Aneez and Ranga Sirilal | Reuters .............................................................................................................................................................................................
Sri Lanka's parliament speaker on Thursday rejected a supreme court summons to a parliamentary panel looking into a move to impeach the chief justice, deepening a crisis that has raised concern about the independence of the country's judiciary. The stand-off in the south Asian state has raised the risk of a destabilising clash between the judiciary and President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government.
By Stewart Bell | National Post.............................................................................................................................................................................................
An officer in the Sri Lanka Army, who fled to Canada and claimed he was ordered to plant explosives at the home of an outspoken opposition politician, is raising new questions about military abuses committed during the island nation’s long civil war.
Captain Ravindra Watudura Bandanage, 38, deserted after flying to Toronto in October 2009.
By Charles Haviland | BBC News [Photo courtesy: Tamil Net] .............................................................................................................................................................................................
Students at Jaffna University in northern Sri Lanka have started a two-day boycott of classes after clashes with security forces on Wednesday. They say they do not feel safe after several were beaten and injured in the worst political disturbances since the civil war ended in 2009.
Security forces entered the university, disrupting students marking a commemoration of dead rebel fighters.
By Peter Fabricius | IOL News.............................................................................................................................................................................................
The Sri Lankan government’s controversial decision to appoint, as its deputy high commissioner to South Africa, an army general accused of war crimes serves – if nothing else – to highlight that country’s inadequate efforts to consign its recent dismal civil war to history.
Sri Lankan high commissioner Winithkumar Shehan Rantavale confirmed speculation in the Sri Lankan media that General Shavendra Silva’s appointment to Pretoria was “in the pipeline”.
By Amal Jayasinghe | AFP[Photo courtesy: Tamil Net] .............................................................................................................................................................................................
Sri Lanka's main Tamil party Thursday demanded troops be withdrawn to barracks in the former rebel heartland of Jaffna after the worst ethnic violence since the end of the island's decades-long civil war.
About 20 students were wounded, seven of whom needed hospital treatment, in clashes with security forces at Jaffna University, underscoring tensions in the region despite the end of the conflict in May 2009.
Sri Lanka's government has criticised a United Nations report on the island's civil war, saying the allegations against the government are 'unsubstantiated and erroneous'.
In a response to an internal review the world body released last week, the external affairs ministry said on Friday the report 'appears to be another attempt at castigating Sri Lanka for militarily defeating' the Tamil Tigers.
The tour guide’s voice echoes around the dark, musty room, three stories
underground. Fifty visitors — among them mothers holding infants,
youths snapping pictures on mobile phones and grandparents leaning
against the walls — are crammed into the narrow stairwell that leads
down into the chamber, listening attentively to his every word.
The
tourists have travelled hundreds of kilometers to see this underground
bunker, once home to the most feared man in Sri Lanka: the leader of the
separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Velupillai
Prabhakaran.
The Sunday Times .............................................................................................................................................................................................
Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake accompanied by her laywers attended the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) sittings which took up the impeachment motion against her today morning. Further sittings were fixed for December 4.
The Chief Justice has been given time to file a response to the allegations before November 30.
International attention on Sri Lanka has focused recently on a devastating report from the United Nations reviewing its own failure to protect civilians during the humanitarian catastrophe of the final months of the island nation’s civil war in 2009. Yet as many in the international community have been looking back, a new, quieter crisis is threatening Sri Lanka’s battered democracy – and the chances of lasting peace – with the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa moving to impeach the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Should the impeachment effort succeed, it will complete a constitutional coup begun in September 2010 with the 18th amendment to the constitution, which ended presidential term limits and removed the independence of commissions on the police, human rights, judiciary, bribery and other areas of governance.
The following report was compiled by a team of World Socialist Web Site reporters who investigated the conditions facing the last group to be forcibly resettled.
We travelled 85 kilometres from Jaffna to Suriyapuram, near Pudukuduirippu, where the final group of war detainees were moved. As you pass Kilinochchi town going toward Pudukuduirippu, you see many military camps. Signs on unoccupied land that read “reserved for military use” indicate that more facilities are being prepared. The entire area remains under military occupation.
People originally from Pudukuduirippu and nearby villages, including Keppapilawu and Seeniyamotai, are not allowed to re-enter their villages, which are occupied by the military. Justifying the government’s decision to keep residents out, Mullaithivu District Government agent N. Vedanayagam declared: “They can compromise national security and hence, we could not settle them in their original villages.”
One of the worst atrocity crime stories of recent decades has barely registered in the world’s collective conscience. We remember and acknowledge the shame of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. We agonize about the failure to halt the atrocities being committed almost daily in Syria. But, at least until now, the world has paid almost no attention to war crimes and crimes against humanity comparable in their savagery to any of these: the killing fields of Sri Lanka in 2009. Three years ago, in the bloody endgame of the Sri Lankan government’s
war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, some
300,000 civilians became trapped between the advancing army and the last
LTTE fighters in what has been called “the cage” – a tiny strip of
land, not much larger than New York City’s Central Park, between sea and
lagoon in the northeast of the country.
The wife of missing Sri Lankan political cartoonist Prageeth Eknelygoda marked 1,000 days since his disappearance Monday with an appeal to UN chief Ban Ki-moon to intervene.
Sandhya Eknelygoda led a group of rights activists and staged a demonstration outside the United Nations offices in Colombo urging the world body to pressure Sri Lanka for information about her husband.
The Indian government has invited Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa to New Delhi for talks, ahead of next month’s session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, according to informed sources. The visit is expected to take place in the next few days because Sri Lanka’s case is to be taken by the UNHRC on November 1, under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) scheme. India is in the three-nation panel which will oversee the review.
In the last session of the UNHRC in March, a US-sponsored resolution hostile to Sri Lanka was passed. In the coming session too, the council is expected to take a critical stance.
Kiri Westby | Huffington Post | [Photo coutesy: RasmusMalm/Ottar.se]............................................................................................................................................................................................. Sometimes winners lose. It's a hard pill to swallow for any activist. After years of struggling to end a violent armed conflict, to usher one's country from a state of "war" to a state of "peace," that the post-war environment should emerge as more corrupt and less safe can be downright disheartening.
Shiv Malik | The Guardian .............................................................................................................................................................................................
The high court has ordered that the imminent deportation to Sri Lanka of a number of Tamils be halted amid claims they may be tortured on their return.
Three solicitors' firms have confirmed to the Guardian that a number of their clients had been given last-minute reprieves and would no longer be flown out of the country on a specially chartered UK Border Agency (UKBA) flight that was expected to be leave on Tuesday afternoon. It is understood that a further 10 to 12 firms have also lodged last-minute appeals on behalf of their clients.
By Alan Keenan | The Interpreter
.............................................................................................................................................................................................Masters of prevarication, the Sri Lankan Government is once again stalling the UN's attempt to ensure an open assessment of the brutal final stages of the country's civil war. The regime is probably hoping interest will fade, but every day it refuses a fair examination of some 40,000 civilian deaths is another small step away from reconciliation between the Sinhalese-dominated state and Tamils, and toward the next ethnic conflict. Colombo's contempt for the international community seems to know no bounds. Six months after the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) requested
that Sri Lanka address its culture of impunity and badly damaged rule of
law, the regime has taken no concrete action.
Sri Lanka's government has confirmed that a United Nations (UN) team will visit the country next month to evaluate post-war reconciliation but insisted that their feedback would not be considered, an official said here on Thursday.
Cabinet spokesman and Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella strongly responded to previous media reports that the UN team would provide expertise on reconciliation efforts made by the government.
You would think that with fighting between government forces and secessionist Tamils finished in May 2009, the Sri Lankan government might ease its grip on public information--information which is really the property of the country's citizens, not whichever administration happens to be holding political power. In 2004, former President Chandrika Bandaranaike's cabinet did approve a Freedom of Information Bill, but parliament was dissolved and the bill never went further.
The issue has been coming and going over the years. The last attempt at legislative change came in 2011, when it was defeated by the government in parliament. One Sri Lankan editor recalls President Mahinda Rajapaksa as telling a group of editors around that time that the country doesn't need what has been relabelled as a Right to Information Act because he would answer whatever questions they might have.
Sri Lanka is not only refusing to bring about reconciliation in the north of the island, where tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the last phase of the war against ethnic Tamil rebels in 2009, it is also fast descending towards dictatorship.
A key question surrounding the country's future is whether its two main trading partners, the United States and India, have the leverage to deter Colombo, or can it resist international pressure with China's help?
Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa said though the military presence in the north had been drastically reduced, troops would continue to remain at strategic locations for security reasons but their presence will be non-intrusive.
“The number of troops deployed and the number of camps remaining in the North and East has also been reduced to a bare minimum. Twenty eight battalions have been relocated in the South and East. The overall number of troops in the North has been reduced by more than 21,000 since 2009.
Abloody civil war was reaching its climax but this Tamil family, who had already experienced the conflict intimately, had one last decision to make that would prove to be the hardest one of all.
Fighting during the early months of 2009, in the last phase of Sri Lanka’s 30 year-long civil conflict, was so intense that a Tamil couple in their sixties was forced to make a heart-wrenching choice when they fled the bloody warzone: whether or not to leave behind Thangamathi, the elderly unmarried sister in the family who had been mentally handicapped since birth and required constant care.
In a war-scarred pocket of jungle in north-eastern Sri Lanka are the remains of the last stronghold of the rebel group, the Tamil Tigers, before they were wiped out by the armed forces in 2009. It looks like a godforsaken place: just to get there busloads of people drive through a swelteringly hot landscape of bombed-out houses, emaciated cattle and mangled cars. But then, surreally, appears a swimming pool, 25 metres long and seven metres deep. This was where government photographs once showed Velupillai Prabhakaran, the pudgy leader of the Tigers, taking a dip and reclining on a lilo.
As wartime propaganda goes, the images were unbeatable. In fact, the pool also had a serious purpose. The frogmen of the rebels’ crack naval wing, the Sea Tigers, trained there, learning to destroy ships by attaching magnetic mines to their hulls.
University teachers were disappointed that Presidential Secretary Lalith Weeratunga had not called them for the third round of discussions, which was earlier scheduled to be held on Monday or Tuesday evening, at the Presidential Secretariat.
President of the Federation of University Teachers Associations (FUTA) Dr. Nirmal Ranjith Devasiri said that their strike was continuing as the government authorities had failed to address their demands so far.
Fairfax senior correspondent Daniel Flitton reported on July 18 that the AFP had dropped an investigation of war crimes into the Sri Lankan High Commissioner, former Admiral, Thisara Samarasinghe.
Samarasinghe joined the Sri Lankan navy in 1974 and retired in 2011, after his appointment to Australia became known. Samarasinghe was Chief of Staff of the Sri Lankan navy in 2009 when the navy carried out the shelling of Tamil women and children in a safe zone designated by the Sri Lankan defence force, in the north of the country, at the end of the civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.
Sri Lanka will amend a decades-old media law in order to bring in all news websites and electronic media under regulation, the government said on Monday, a week after it raided and temporarily closed down two anti-government websites.
The amendments to the Press Council Law enacted in 1973 will allow the government to order websites and electronic media to follow media codes in addition to print media.
The parents of a prisoner who died in obscure circumstances in Sri Lanka are locked in a battle with officials who say his body cannot be taken to his home town for the last rites.
Ganesan Nimalaruban died and several other inmates, all Tamil Tiger suspects, were reportedly injured after a failed prison mutiny in the north.
Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa went berserk when contacted by The Sunday Leader to clarify and find out if he was aware that the management at SriLankan Airlines had taken a decision to change a wide bodied A340 scheduled to fly to Zurich on Friday July 13, to a smaller A330. The change was to be made so that a SriLankan Airline pilot, who is dating a niece of President Mahinda Rajapaksa could personally fly the aircraft that would carry a ‘puppy dog’ for Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa from Zurich.
The Sunday Leader was told by senior airline pilots that 56 passengers would have had to be off-loaded if the aircraft was changed.
The British government is continuing to deport Tamil asylum seekers to Sri Lanka despite more evidence emerging that some of those removed are being tortured.
As I reported last year, there is a wealth of evidence that Sri Lankan authorities continue to practice torture on political opponents. Yet British authorities have insisted that the country is safe and hundreds of those fleeing the country have been returned.
Is there any other country in the civilized world where the police act under a repealed section of the penal law when making arrests and that gigantic mistake is then sought to be justified by government ministers in the legislative assembly by resorting to the most annoying twaddle?
This is a pertinent question in the wake of recent arrests by the police of opposition web journalists under Section 118 of Sri Lanka’s Penal Code. This Section was however repealed in June 2002 by Penal Code Amendment Act, No 12 of 2002. Section 118 of the Penal Code relates to attempts to bring the President into contempt by contumacious or insulting words or signs and was repealed under the hand of the United National Front government along with the sections relating to criminal defamation.
The Sri Lankan government has been accused of human rights violation following the closure of two opposition websites this week.
While human rights organisations called the raids a part of a the government’s bid to intimidate and harass all critical journalists, the US and the UN have severely criticised the move.
Sri Lanka hit back Wednesday over claims it is clamping down on press freedom after criticism from rights groups and Washington for its shuttering of opposition news websites.
"Look at the newspapers in Sri Lanka. Can you possibly say that there is no freedom of press in the country? There is so much," Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris told reporters in Tokyo.
Sri Lanka’s state investment promotion agency said it had inked a deal with a Singapore led consortium to build a 3 billion US dollar tourism city in Katana, north of the capital Colombo.
A consortium led by Asian Resorts, Casinos, a Singapore based firm, will invest in Katana City Developments Private Limited, the project company.
Sri Lanka should implement several key measures contained in a report by a commission which studied lessons to be learnt from a recent civil war, some of which can be done without delay, a civil organization of professionals has said.
Sri Lanka's Organization of Professional Association, a civil society organization said a report by Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) had come up with many good recommendations to promote good governance and ethnic reconciliation.
Sri Lankan parliamentarians in favour of acting on the recommendations in a report into the final stages of the country’s civil war by the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) are slowly gaining ground over those who are not, says a presidential peace process adviser.
The government’s initial reaction to the LLRC recommendations was positive, presidential adviser and parliamentarian Rajiva Wijesinha told IRIN, but others saw the report, released just over six months ago, as a call for regime change and were “highly critical”.
The Sri Lankan government should immediately end harassment of media outlets and journalists in violation of the right to freedom of expression, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday (03). In the three years since the end of the armed conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government has expanded its efforts to silence critical views.
On June 29, 2012, the Criminal Investigation Department, acting on a court order, raided the offices of the Sri Lanka Mirror, a news website, and Sri Lanka X News, a website of the opposition United National Party. The authorities confiscated computers and documents, and arrested nine people on the grounds that the websites were “propagating false and unethical news on Sri Lanka.” They were charged under article 120 of the Penal Code, which imposes up to two years in prison for those who “excite or attempt to excite feelings of disaffection to the president or to the government.” The day after their arrest the nine were released on bail.
The United States will remain engaged with Sri Lanka despite some differences of opinion on the political front, the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka said on Wednesday.
In a message released in Colombo to mark America's Independence Day, the U.S. envoy in Colombo Patricia Butenis noted that the Sri Lankan government has made progress on the resettlement issue and post war development.
The main minority Tamil political party in Sri Lanka said on Tuesday that moves aimed at reaching a political solution to the ethnic issue in the country remained deadlocked.
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) legislator M.A. Sumanthiran told Xinhua that his party leader R. Sampanthan and the leader of the main opposition United National Party (UNP) Ranil Wickremesinghe had met over the weekend in an attempt to look for a way forward.
They live in the jungle, on the ground without a roof or a tent over their heads, surrounded by elephants, snakes and other wildlife. There are 145 families, 285 Tamil Catholics from the village of Mullikulam in Mannar District (Northern Province, Sri Lanka).
Three years after the end of Sri Lanka's civil war, child advocates say the ongoing heavy military presence in the former conflict zones, especially the north, continues to traumatise children.
Sri Lanka's military defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels three years ago, and the UN children's agency UNICEF has described as 'remarkable' the progress made in child health and education.
Looking at our immediate neighbor India and other countries like Canada, Belgium and Switzerland with multilingual, multiethnic and multireligious groups show that there are ways forward to find a constitutional structure to achieve equality and peace by recognizing the differences. All these countries have resolved the differences between communities internally, led by leaders who considered that the integrity of the country is paramount; the majority respected the minority wishes and granted equal rights to all citizens and settled the differences amicably.
Examples of good governance are demonstrated in India and Canada, where they have had as head of the government or as a head of the country people of different ethnic backgrounds which strengthened the integrity of the country. Another evolving and working example is in the United Kingdom, where three ethnic groups Irish, Scottish and Welsh people have their separate governments, soon Scotland will hold a referendum among their people whether they should be an Independent country or not, which demonstrates maturity of the country which is the birth place of modern parliamentary democracy.
Two contrasting insights into reconciliation were on display in the last ten days – one in the field of sports and the other in the field of politics. The former relates to the Carlton Super Seven Rugby Tournament and the latter to the ITAK or Federal Party convention in Batticaloa. The significance of the latter is of course beyond dispute given that it was the party convention of the major party in the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and the speech made by its leader R.Sampanthan has been the subject of columns, editorials and dire conclusions on what it portends for the fate of the nation-state of Sri Lanka. The former may seem trivial by contrast – a sporting event, even tamasha, that attracted the attention of few.
Sporting events though have their role to play in reconciliation and are replete with political significance and purpose. The Carlton Super Seven Rugby Tournament was no exception. Joint winners of the tournament was a team called the Jaffna Challengers captained by a young naval officer who also happens to be a son of the President of the republic.
The Sri Lankan Police in Jaffna on Monday blocked a protest that gained momentum receiving wider participation against the occupying SL military's land grab in the peninsula. As hundreds of activists gathered in front of the Jaffna Bus Stand, the SL Police appealed to the Judge of the District Court stating that the Police had information that 'destructive elements' were about to use the protest to disturb normalcy in the city and blocked the protest at last minute.
The protest, initiated by the Tamil National Peoples Front (TNPF) and attended by the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), Mano Ganesan's Democratic Peoples Front (DPF) and the leftist parties from the South as well the support it received from the Jaffna University Students Union (JUSU) and the trade unions including the teachers trade union, marked the protest as first of its kind in the post-war scenario in the peninsula.
It would be seem redundant to reiterate that the exploitation of mineral resources in any country would impact on its economy. There are many examples from around the world – from the Island of Nauru to the African Continent where unplanned and unregulated mining activity has spelt doom for the countries concerned.
Those who have successfully managed the long term exploitation of mineral resources, i.e. Germany and the USA have done so through careful regulation and planning which have served to prolong the sustainability of their resources as well as minimize ecological degradation.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) charged yesterday that Friday’s attack on a party meeting in the Hambantota village of Hediwatte was a direct attempt by the Government to scare the party from engaging in political activity in the district.
Ten men on motorcycles, some carrying automatic rifles, attacked the JVP meeting, killing two and injuring four, all active members of the party JVP frontliner Vijitha Herath said that after opening fire into the air, the gunmen fired into a group who were being addressed by Western Provincial Council member Nalinda Jayatissa.
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By P K Balachandran | Indian Express
By Alan Keenan | The Interpreter
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