09/08/2010
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InterPress Service, IPS
COLOMBO, Sep 8, 2010 (IPS) - The European Union’s decision to suspend trade preferences for Sri Lankan exports may have finally come into force, but the island nation is not budging an inch on any of the powerful bloc’s recommendations on its controversial human rights record.
China, GSP+, human rights, India, trade
08/20/2010
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Asian Human Rights Commission
The beating of an opposition Member of Parliament by officers of the Galle police raises one important question: how many times do you have to beat an MP before he learns his lesson?
08/18/2010
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Al-Jazeera
The Sri Lankan defence secretary has defended the military against allegations of mass rights abuses during last year's assault on Tamil Tiger separatists.
08/17/2010
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BBC
The man who oversaw Sri Lanka's defeat of Tamil Tiger rebels has said he believes more than 6,000 of them were killed in the final stages of fighting.
08/17/2010
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Reuters
Sri Lanka said on Tuesday that the army did all it could to avoid civilian casualties in the war with Tamil rebels and blamed the United Nations as failing to halt the rebels’ use of civilians as human shields. Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who led the army to victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam last year, justified the troops’ conduct in the final days of the fighting. Speaking on civilian deaths, into which Western countries and the United Nations had called for an independent inquiry, Mr. Rajapaksa said the government fought with a zero-casualty policy and most of those killed in the rebel-held area were separatists. Mr. Rajapaksa, President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s brother, was testifying in Colombo before the state-appointed Commission on Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation. Rights groups have questioned panel’s credibility.
08/15/2010
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Agence France-Presse
DANKOTUWA, Sri Lanka — Sri Lankan exporters braced for hard times as the EU's withdrawal of import concessions took effect Sunday after Colombo's refusal to allow scrutiny of its human rights record.
08/14/2010
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Vancouver Sun
From the Komagata Maru carrying 376 Punjabi passengers and the SS St. Louis travelling with 900 Jewish asylum seekers, to the boats with 600 people from China's Fujian province and the Ocean Lady that docked in B.C. last year with Tamil refugees - there is something about boatloads of migrants that triggers a national hysteria. Perhaps it is the realization that the expanse of ocean is not enough to enforce the divide between the West and the so-called Third World.
08/14/2010
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Reuters
(Reuters) - Sri Lanka's minority Tamils testified before a government-appointed war commission on Saturday alleging rights violations during the final stages of the army's offensive against separatist Tamil Tiger rebels.
08/10/2010
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Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON — A group of US lawmakers is urging the Obama administration to push for an independent international investigation into alleged war crimes that occurred during Sri Lanka's civil war.
08/05/2010
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Asian Human Rights Commission
For several decades now the Sri Lankan people have been exposed to extraordinary acts of separation, large scale forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture, illegal arrest and detention. This and large scale displacement of people from their homes by way of internal displacement or by leaving the country altogether and the disappearance of even elementary forms of protection available to people within the legal and social sphere are among the many issues that have caused massive forms of trauma in the population as a whole.