Chandana Keerthi Bandara, BBC journalist who was allegedly fired in large part for prioritizing a report on the anniversary of violence in Sri Lanka over the birth of Prince George has received £51,428 in compensation after suing the news outlet for unfair dismissal.
Chandana Keerthi Bandara, 57, was in charge of overseeing the publishing of stories on July 23, 2013 – the day after Prince George was born. However, he said he chose not to prioritize the royal birth, partially because it clashed with the anniversary of Black July – a wave of anti-Tamil violence which led to hundreds of deaths in Sri Lanka in 1983.
We will bring International investigators for inquiries relating to missing persons, Tamil National Alliance MP M.A. Sumanthiran said. He said, that there are many who strongly oppose the idea to bring international judges, but not for international investigators.
Sri Lanka has to respond to the UN Human Rights council resolution adopted in 2014 which called for an independent investigation into alleged war crimes blamed on both the government troops and the LTTE during the country’s civil war.
Sri Lanka’s proposed Truth Seeking Commission, a Reparations Office and a Judicial Mechanism will be decided by mid-October after the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation hands over its report, a top diplomat has said.
The solution to the national question must be found in the new Constitution being formulated, Opposition Leader R.Sampanthan reiterated at an event in Trincomalee yesterday. Sampanthan said his party will be forced to withdraw support if the government does not propose a viable political resolution to the national problem through the Constitutional reforms.
While noting that the views and aspirations of the Tamils had not being taken aboard in a comprehensive manner when formulating previous constitutions, Sampanthan said that he hoped the new government will not make the same mistake.
Kaviratne Raviraj, 30 years old, arrested and taken to the Pussellawa police station by some plain clothed police officers and was later pronounced dead upon admission to the Pussellawa Hospital. According to the relatives of the deceased, he was assaulted by the officers at the time of the arrest, and one of his brothers states that he saw his brother being assaulted inside the police station.
Large crowds gathered on learning of this death, protesting against what happened to the deceased at the police station. The protestors stated that if such killings occur at police stations, it is not safe for them to go to a police station. As a result of the protest, one Sub Inspector and one constable have been suspended. However, the crowd demanded that the OIC should be suspended immediately.
Government leaders have been saying that the draft constitution will be placed before the Parliament prior to the budget debate that takes place in November. A new constitution which would require a referendum could prove to be the government’s Waterloo if the people reject it. Last week Chairman of the Public Representations Committee Lal Wijenayake, made an announcement that five of the six sub-committees of Parliament that had been delegated the task of submitting reports on various aspects of the new constitution had completed their work. The Public Representations Committee (PRC), appointed by the Prime Minister with 19 other members, made a special effort in consultations with the general public on the matters connected with the drafting of the new constitution. Chairman Wijenayake assured those who had made submissions to the PRC that their views would be taken into account in the drafting of the new constitution.
United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) website said that among the several issues being taken at its current sessions which opened in Geneva Tuesday is the issue on Sri Lanka.
That subject will revolve round the report of the 'Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances on its mission to Sri Lanka-Note by the Secretariat' and 'comments by the State (Sri Lanka)' on this report.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid, did not mention Sri Lanka in his opening address at the 33 rd. session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva on Tuesday.
This was because the theme of his speech was the problem of countries not giving access to UN rights investigative teams and the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government in Sri Lanka, which came to power in January 2015, has been giving access to UN rights teams. The new government has also been making some progress in implementing the October 2015 UNHRC resolution on war time rights violations.
A number of positive measures have been taken by the current Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) to further reconciliation and to facilitate transitional justice in Sri Lanka. The most far reaching democratic achievement under the new Government was the establishment of a number of institutions1 which exercise checks and balances on the State power.
The most recent but also the most important such institution in terms of transitional justice is the Office of Missing Persons (OMP). The consultation process conducted by the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms (CTF) is another welcomed development. On the top of all this, the democratic space created by the current regime remains the most beneficial factor in campaigning for and achieving rights.
The UN Human Rights Council’s (HRC) 33rd session began on Tuesday and Sri Lanka is on the agenda. The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) is set to officially release a report on the island nation. The report is already in the public domain, although this is the first time the document will be presented to the Geneva-based HRC.
Disappearances in Sri Lanka have been a longstanding problem. Appropriately, an Office of Missing Persons (OMP) is one of the four main pillars of the government’s transitional justice process.
Sri Lanka’s Tamil political prisoners have been back in the spotlight recently. Tamil political prisoners are ethnic Tamils who were allegedly members of or connected to the Tamil Tigers, a separatist group. Some have been convicted on charges of terrorism, though most have not. Many of the charges are believed to be fabricated and based upon coerced confessions, which were recorded in a language foreign to the accused. The new government has repeatedly promised to deal with the issue, but it has done little. While Obama may be keen to champion Sri Lanka’s peaceful transfer of power to bolster his foreign policy record, Colombo’s failure to act more decisively on political prisoners is unjust, calls into question its commitment to transitional justice, and illustrates that Sri Lanka is far from a clear-cut success story.
Denmark has apologised to Sri Lanka for recognising ‘Tamil Eelam’ as one of the countries from which foreigners could apply for visas.
A top Foreign Ministry official told The Island last night that Denmark had promised to remove the offending section.
The Danish Immigration website shows ‘Tamil Eelam’ as one of the options to be selected under the category ‘nationality’ when filling out its visa application.
Ban Ki-Moon acknowledged the “big mistakes” the UN made in relation to Sri Lanka under his leadership, but is yet to lay out a concrete rights-based strategy for the country.
Madushka De Silva disappeared on September 2, 2013 in Anuradhapura – Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-Buddhist heartland in the North Central Province. The third anniversary of his disappearance coincided with Ban Ki-Moon’s visit to the country. On that day, the UN secretary general was so close, and yet so far from De Silva’s wife, Mauri Inoka.
The “Mahavamsa”, arguably the greatest chronicle of Sri Lanka, narrates that the founder of the Sinhalese community had his roots among ancestors from East India.
Sinhalese, who make up about 75 per cent of the Sri Lankan population have descended from inhabitants of ancient East India.
Gayashan still remains missing following police detention at the Hambanthota Police Station
The Inspector General of Police Pujith Jayasundera is reported to have spoken with the father of Gayashan, promising that he would do everything in his power to find the young man, or take serious action if something has happened to him. Despite this, there is still not even a clue about what happened to Gayashan.
Last week a function was held at Ananda College, Colombo, to launch the book Road to Nandikadal by Major General Kamal Gunaratne. Neither the President, nor the Prime Minister or any Member of Parliament or Minister of this government had been invited for this function. Only former President Mahinda Rajapaksa and former Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa had received invitations.
The Major General presented the book to Mahinda Rajapaksa. During Mahinda's Government, if a Major General invited only the Opposition and presented a book he had written, only to the Leader of the Opposition, the Major General would have been branded a Tiger and the stars of the Major General would have been removed and there was a chance he would even have been deprived of his pension.
The Tamil Lawyers’ Forum (TLF) has petitioned the Office of the UN Human Rights Commissioner to set up a committee of scientists and medical professionals “of international repute” to examine former cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who have been complaining of illnesses and debilities of various kinds which they allege are the result of the injection of some poisonous substances while they were held in captivity by the Sri Lankan army after the end of Eelam War IV.
The Maxwell Paranagama Presidential Commission on Missing Persons has strongly recommended in its final report that in the event of Sri Lanka were to set up a purely domestic tribunal without the participation of any foreign judges, there must be an international technical assistance and observers to ensure the acceptance of the mechanism, the Daily Mirror learns.
The Commission has wound up its activities after the enactment of the Office of Missing Persons (OMP) and handed over its final report to the President last month.
The army would not return even an inch of the 4,419 acre land belonging to the Jaffna camp and Palaly Military cantonment, Jaffna Security Forces Commander Maj Gen Mahesh Senanayake said.
He said that the Palaly High Security Zone had encompassed around 11,269 acres until 2010 and 7,210 acres had been given back to their original owners on government instructions and now the army was not in a position to return any more lands owing to security requirements in the former war-zone area.
There is something deeply negative and nihilist imbedded into the Sri Lanka consciousness. By ‘Sri Lankan consciousness’ I mean the consciousness of all Sri Lankans, whether they are from the majority Sinhala community or the Tamil or other minority communities. What is common to all is a deep negativity inherited from the far distant past.
In my recent book on Asoka’s policy of Dhamma and democratic values, I trace this negativity to the influence of an Indian philosopher named Adi Shankara, who lived around the 8th Century AD and whose influence on India, pulling it in the same direction of nihilism and negativity, is enormous. Following several others, I have tried to show how this philosophy was brought into Sri Lanka by several Indian invasions in the 8th Century and thereafter, and how it became the predominant philosophical mold in the country, and how it has molded generations upon generations of Sri Lankans.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday acknowledged that the UN could have saved many lives during the last seven months of the war, and the UN 'made big mistakes and learned very hard lessons'. He said he held an internal probe as to what happened during those months.
During his speech on 'Sri Lanka on SDG16: Sustaining Peace – Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals' held in Colombo, the SG while blaming Sri Lanka too for causing serious problems to its own people, added that even the UN during the last seven decades, particularly, in the last seven months 'made big mistakes' in Sri Lanka.
Where do we stand today in terms of reconciliation and development in Sri Lanka?
The political transition is a historic opportunity to achieve sustainable peace in Sri Lanka. The UN has been engaging comprehensively with the government to advance reconciliation and address issues of accountability. The UN strategy brings the three pillars of peace, development and human rights working in close coordination for durable peace.
Dozens of Sri Lankan nationalists rallied outside the United Nations compound in Colombo Thursday as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the island, protesting against the UN's actions during a prolonged civil war.
Police held back the demonstrators led by Buddhist monks as they tried to march on the compound just before Ban arrived on the first full day of his two-day visit to Sri Lanka.
Human rights activists and families of missing people rallied in Sri Lanka on Tuesday (August 30) in support of an office recently set up to independently investigate the cases of thousands of people who vanished during the government's long conflict with Tamil Tiger rebels.
The march marks International Day Against Forced Disappearances and comes a day ahead of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's three-day visit.
Tamil Fest broke records in its second year, drawing over 150,000 visitors from across North America and becoming the largest event to be hosted in Scarborough. Hosted by the Canadian Tamil Congress, the annual festival took place from August 26 to 28 and is now also the largest Tamil event hosted outside of South Asia.
“Tamil Fest is about celebrating the spectacular diversity of Canada, and of showcasing the best of Tamil arts, culture, cuisine, and entertainment,” said David Poopalapillai, National Spokesperson for the Canadian Tamil Congress.
