Today marks thirty-eight years since the horrors of the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983, when thousands of Tamils were killed by Sinhala mobs backed by the then UNP government and state forces.
Tamil News
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Photo credit (Twitter: @PragasGnanam) Read more here.
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Sarah Hulton, British High Commissioner in Sri Lanka reaffirms the United Kingdom's “commitment to Sri Lanka” as consultations begin on a new trade scheme, despite international concern over the deteriorating human rights situation in Sri Lanka.
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One of the key eyewitnesses of the notorious 2012 Welikada prison massacre, Sudesh Nandimal De Silva, received death threats by two unidentified people.
According to Attorney-at-Law and the chairman of the Committee for Protecting Rights of Prisoners (CPRP), Senaka Perera, the two unidentified people had inquired from neighbours about De...
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A remembrance event was held for Selvarajah Yogachandran, referred to as Kuttimani, and Nadarajah Thangavelu, alias Thangathurai, the co-founding leaders of TLO (Tamil Liberation Organisation), at the Tamil National Party office in Jaffna on Sunday.
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The Presidential Commission of Inquiry for Appraisal of the Findings of Previous Commissions and Committees on Human Rights and the Way Forward provided President Gotabaya Rajapaksa with its interim report on Wednesday calling for the Prevention of Terrorism Act to be reformed instead of repealed.
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Sri Lanka's Forest Department is alleged to have facilitated the illegal trade of timber across the North-East, particularly forested areas in Mullaitivu which have been targeted by illegal loggers leading to high rates of deforestation within the area.
Teak trees cut in the Murrippu, in the...
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Marking 38 years since the horrors of Black July, the People for Equality and Relief for in Lanka (PEARL) renewed calls for justice and reflected on the "indelible impact of this genocide committed against Tamil people."
In a statement, the US-based organisation highlighted that the violent massacres of Black July, which took over 3,000 Tamil lives and forced...
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Demonstration were carried out in Jaffna, Amparai, Vavuniya and Mannar to mark the 38th anniversary of Black July, paying tribute to the thousands of Tamil lives lost during the state-sponsored anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983.
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Marking the 38th anniversary of the Black July massacre in which over 3,000 Tamils were slaughtered, Canada’s Prime Minister and senior parliamentarians marked the memorial by demanding accountability for human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put out an official statement commemorating the "horrific events".
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Marking the 38th anniversary of the Black July massacre in which over 3,000 Tamils were slaughtered, German Tamils gathered in the city centre of Berlin to remember this act of genocide.
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British Tamils gathered outside Downing Street to mark the 38th anniversary of Black July, when thousands of Tamils were killed by Sinhala mobs backed by the Sri Lankan state.
LIVE - British Tamils mark 38th anniversary of Black July...
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Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, remembered the “victims of the horrific events” of Black July, which took the lives of thousands of Tamils 38 years ago.
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Protesters in Jaffna marked the 38th anniversary of Black July, the horrific anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 when thousands of Tamils were killed by Sinhala mobs backed by the then UNP government and state forces.
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Jaffna Municipal Council marked the 38th anniversary of Black July by paying tribute to the thousands of Tamil lives lost during the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983.
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Following the appointment of Basil Rajapaksa to the cabinet, the Economist highlights growing unrest throughout Sri Lanka including farmers, teachers, war victims, and civil society actors. In light of this growing unrest, the Economist writes that “the Rajapaksas’ suffocating hold on power look like a weakness”.
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In advance of the Moody Investor Service placing Sri Lanka “under review for downgrade” Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Finance slammed the agency’s announcement claiming that it was “ill-timed, ill-judged and hence unacceptable’.
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Vavuniya Families of the Disappeared marked 1,616 days of continuous protest yesterday, as they continued their struggle for justice and accountability.
The demonstrators, who have been protesting to know the whereabouts of their forcibly disappeared loved ones, stated, “our economy has been...
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Photo credit (Twitter: @PragasGnanam)
Protesters in Colombo on Thursday demanded the arrest of the perpetrators who sexually abused a 16-year-old girl who reportedly committed suicide by setting...
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Following a recent meeting of the Joint Apparel Association Forum (JAAF), attended by Sri Lanka’s Foreign Secretary and State Minister Tharaka Balasuriya, the Secretary of the JAAF claimed that progress was being made and expressed optimism over the continuation over the GSP+ trading arrangement.
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Speaking in Parliament, former Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe admitted that the Government of India had alerted Sri Lanka’s Police intelligence service of the Easter Sunday attacks hours prior to the incident however the police failed to act.
Over 270 people lost their lives during the attack and a further 500 were injured.
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Ceylon Teachers’ Union (CTU)’s secretary, Joseph Stalin and 15 other union members who were arrested and kept at the Keppapulavu Air Force camp, were released on Friday morning following mounting condemnation of their detention.
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Sri Lankan President, and accused war criminal, Gotabaya Rajapaksa has appointed convicted Murder and former MP Duminda Silva as the chairman of the National Housing Development Authority.
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Earlier this week, Britain’s High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Sarah Hulton, meet with Sri Lanka’s Minister for Youth and Sports, Namal Rajapaksa, where they reportedly discussed “online harms facing women, girls and vulnerable groups, human rights issues, and youth and sport opportunities”.
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Qatari authorities deported a Tamil man to Sri Lanka this week despite the threats of torture; where the Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) arrested him for allegedly “promoting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)”.
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The Tamil Nadu Forest Department has confiscated 300 kilograms of banned sea cucumbers that were to be smuggled to Sri Lanka. They have also arrested and jailed seven persons involved in the smuggling incident and seized over 24 boats worth over 2 million rupees used for smuggling.
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Following the appointment of Basil Rajapaksa to the position of Finance Minister, Germany’s Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Holger Seubert, meet with the Finance Minister despite ongoing human rights violations.
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Sri Lankan Minister of Public Security, Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekara, has called for mandatory military training for those above the age of 18, despite increasing concerns over the intensifying militarisation of the state.
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The Batticaloa District Tamil Journalists Association has written a letter to Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa demanding to ensure press freedom in the island.
This comes following the Terrorism Investigation Department’s (TID) interrogation of Selvakumar Nilanthan, a journalist based in Batticaloa.
The subject line of the letter read, “Stop suppression of journalism! Ensure protection of journalists!!”
The letter started...
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The Canadian government has announced that it will grant tens of millions of dollars in funding towards the construction of a ground breaking Tamil Community Centre (TCC) in Toronto, marking a milestone in decades of committed work from...
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Surgeons at Mullaitivu District Hospital performed the hospital's first successful knee replacement surgery on Tuesday.
World News
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During an Axios interview, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan, fell silent on the Uyghur genocide, claiming that any issues Pakistan had with China would “always be behind closed doors”.
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Marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping warned foreign powers that China “will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us”.
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Solar lamps marking each of the discovered unmarked grave - Photo credit: (Mickey Djruic/CBC)
751 unmarked graves were discovered at the site of a former residential school in Saskatchewan, just weeks after the remains of 215 children were found in British Columbia.
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Alieu Kosiah, became the first Liberian to be convicted for war crimes committed during the country’s civil war, in a court hearing in Switzerland earlier this month.
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Concluding the first-day summit, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called for a unified response to the challenges posed by China.
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Photograph: UN News
An appeal by Ratko Mladic, the commander of Bosnian Serb forces in the country’s 1992-95 war, against the 2017 verdict that convicted him of genocide has been turned down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
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Switzerland will be holding a referendum on a controversial terrorism bill, which has been widely panned by international human rights organisations, on 13 June.
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Photo credit (Twitter: @TVRVNTO)
A mass grave was found at a residential school in British Colombia, Canada, containing the remains of 215 indigenous children on Friday.
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French President, Emmanuel Macron, asked for Rwandan’s forgiveness its silence over the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu dissidents were killed, however, Macron fell short of apologising for the role France played.
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Myanmar’s ousted democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi made her first public appearance since the military deposed her government and seized power on 1 February 2021, at a court hearing on Monday.
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Palestinian casualties have sharply increased as Israel stepped up its bombardment of Gaza early on Friday as tanks and artillery massed at the border and joined aerial attacks.
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The Irob minority group in Ethiopia are facing an existential crisis in addition to the mass atrocities inflicted by ongoing conflict in the Tigray state.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched military forces in response to “traitorous” attacks on military camps that has since escalated to thousands of civilian casualties, hundreds of thousands of people who have been internally displaced within Tigray, and 63,000 refugees who have fled to Sudan since fighting broke out on...
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The Taliban has announced a three-day ceasefire to mark Eid al-Fitr following the bombing of a girls’ school in Dasht-e-Barchi, in which over 50 people, mostly young girls, were killed and over 100 were injured.
Afghanistan’s President, Ashraf Ghani, accused the Taliban of conducting the attack and declared Tuesday a day of national...
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Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reported that Israel’s policies constitute apartheid; with the intention to “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied...
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Over 100 Palestinians and 20 Israeli police were injured in a far-right Israeli protest in occupied East Jerusalem.
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A group of UK charities and Human Rights Watch joined Palestine in condemning British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s letter to the Conservative Friends of Israel, in which he expressed the UK’s opposition to the ICC decision to investigate alleged war crimes in Palestine since June 2014.
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Joe Biden is the first US President to formally recognise the systematic killing of over a million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, as genocide.
In a statement marking Armenian Remembrance Day, Biden wrote:
"We remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and...
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The European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on eight Iranian militia officers and police chiefs over a deadly crackdown of protests in November 2019 by the Islamic Republic.
Hossein Salami, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was amongst those who were sanctioned.
“Hossein Salami took part in the sessions that resulted in the orders to use lethal force to suppress the November 2019 protests. Hossein Salami therefore bears responsibility for serious human rights...
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Photo of US troop in Afghanistan
Following the announcement of US President, Joe Biden, that America would withdraw its forces from Afghanistan by 11th September, Britain has similarly stated that it will withdraw nearly all of its approximately 750 soldiers.
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The British House of Lords has voted down the government’s proposed overseas operation bill which would establish “a presumption against prosecution” for service personnel accused of committing crimes overseas, except for sexual offences, if more than five years had passed since the alleged...
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A Turkish court has jailed for life 22 former soldiers for their involvement in a coup attempt that sought to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A mass trial which concluded on Wednesday investigated nearly 500 soldiers and identified the ex-military personnel as guilty.
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Addressing the media today, Former Myanmar ambassador, Kyaw Zwar Minn, said that staff were forced to leave Myanmar’s embassy and he was dismissed as the country’s representative by Myanmar’s military attaché.
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Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, has announced further sanctions on Myanmar, targeting the military-linked conglomerate Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) following the military coup on the 1 February.
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The former United Nations Special Rapporteur on arbitrary executions and renowned human rights law professor Christof Heyns passed away this weekend.
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Tributes have flooded in around the world for Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian doctor, feminist and writer, who was a panel member in the 2010 Permanent People’s Tribunal on Sri Lanka which acknowledged the “importance of continuing investigation into the possibility of genocide”.
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Secretary-General of the UN António Guterres stressed the key role that the United Nationals plays in combating deteriorating human rights violations around the globe in his opening remarks at the 46th session of the UNHRC session in Geneva.
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The United Kingdom and Canada announced that they are imposing sanctions on individuals responsible for serious human rights violations against the people of Myanmar during the coup.
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced that three Myanmar military generals will face travel bans and their assets will be frozen under the UK's sanctions regime.
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Photo of ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda
The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday determined that it has jurisdiction over the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, opening the way for the chief prosecutor to inquire into allegations of Israeli war crimes.
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Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been detained by the country’s military following a military coup in which the top army commander, Min Aung Hlaing, seized total control.