200,000 people remain trapped in Sri Lankan detainee camps

Facing pressure from the Obama administration and the European Union, the Sri Lankan government last month launched a campaign to resettle tens of thousands of the minority Tamil detainees. But interviews in the country’s war-ravaged north reveal that many civilians have merely been shuffled from the large camps to smaller transit ones and are being [...]

Secret detention camps in Sri Lanka

Human Rights Watch said it was concerned about a lack of protection mechanisms in the camps for internally displaced civilians who are being held in internment camps in northern Sri Lanka.  The Sri Lankan government says they can’t be released until they’ve been screened to determine if any are former fighters with the opposition Tamil [...]

ICJ Condemns Misuse of Anti-Terrorism Laws to Prosecute Sri Lankan Journalist

On 31 August 2009, Mr Tissainayagam, a Tamil journalist who wrote articles criticising the Sri Lankan government’s war against the Tamil Tigers, was convicted under anti-terrorism laws and sentenced by Judge Deepali Wijesundara to 20 years “rigorous imprisonment.” The journalist’s case has attracted international attention, with President Obama saying earlier this year it was “emblematic [...]

Sri Lanka extends anti-terror laws

Sri Lanka’s government on Tuesday extended tough anti-terror laws, arguing that remnants of the defeated Tamil Tiger rebels could still try to stage a comeback.
Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake told parliament that the government wanted to extend the state of emergency by a month despite last month’s defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) [...]

Sri Lankan president officially declares civil war victory

Sri Lanka’s President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, in a nationally televised address to Parliament, formally declared an end to the decades-long civil war.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
The war on terror scored a big victory this weekend with the Sri Lankan army’s battlefield defeat of the terrorist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The event vindicates [...]

Sri Lankan Ambassador to US: ‘Ceasefire will mean more terrorism’

9 May 2009 – Daily News (Sri Lanka)
Colombo, May 9 — Sri Lankan Ambassador to the US Jaliya Wickramasuriya told a May 6 gathering of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C. think tank, that a ceasefire with the cornered LTTE will only lead to more terrorism.
Speaking in a program entitled “Sri Lanka” Beyond Terrorism,” Ambassador [...]

ICJ releases briefing paper on Sri Lankan emergency laws and international standards

According to the ICJ, the complex and confusing emergency and anti-terrorism laws that have been put into place have frequently served to exacerbate rather than resolve the crisis by infringing on the rights of ordinary citizens, including human rights defenders, lawyers and journalists.This briefing paper summarizes the main provisions of Sri Lanka’s various emergency laws [...]

Arundhati Roy warns for a potential genocide in Sri Lanka conflict, calls on India to act

Read his piece in The Age here:
From the little information that is filtering through, it looks as though the Sri Lankan Government is using the propaganda of “the war on terror” as a fig leaf to dismantle any semblance of democracy in the country and commit unspeakable crimes against the Tamil people. Working on the [...]

Sri lanka engages in state terrorism according to MP

According to the Far Eastern Economic Review:
Terror has long played a big part in the war — the Tigers pioneered the use of suicide bombing, and have repeatedly struck at top government leaders even in the heavily guarded capital of Colombo. And the government will continue to respond in kind, using extrajudicial means to silence [...]

Sri Lanka: Military accuses international NGOs of complicity with LTTE

(ICJ) On 24 March, the Ministry of Defence of Sri Lanka, in a press release, accused international aid NGOs of forming a “vicious coalition” harbouring terrorists and seeking to prolong the armed confict. In particular, the army accused the NGO CARE International, which had denounced the killing by the army of one of its aid [...]