Premalal Jayasekara, a Sri Lankan politician who is currently on death row for murder, took his oath as a Member of Parliament earlier today.

The politician from the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party (SLPP), was convicted of murdering an opposition activist after opening fire at a 2015 election rally, just days nominations for the parliamentary polls had closed in August. As such, he was allowed to contest and won his seat. 

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Sri Lanka’s top Catholic official, has backed calls for a ban on all political parties “based on religion and language,” a move that has previously been proposed by Sri Lanka’s prime minister and one that may have dire consequences for the island’s Tamils and Muslims.

“I urge the government to ban all parties based on religion and language,” Ranjith said in a homily last week. “This is not a matter of politics, this is a matter of humanity,” he continued, adding, “It is wrong to base a political party on religion and language.”

Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad said that Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) should be removed from the country’s list of terrorist groups. 

Mohamad, a veteran politician that has dominated Malaysian politics for decades, was speaking about a letter he is purported to have written in January while he was still Prime Minister to the then Home Minister and now prime minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin in which he was reported to have urged Mr Yassin to scrap LTTE from the terrorist groups list. 

Sinhala Buddhist monk Ellawala Medhananda stated that “tenant” Tamils shouldn’t cause hassle for the “landlord” Sinhalese, in response to a speech by TMTK MP C V Wigneswaran in parliament last month, claiming there is “no proof that the North and East are historical Tamil provinces”.

The General Secretary of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) G L Peiris slammed the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) for meeting with the Indian High Commission and discussing the 13th Amendment to Sri Lanka’s constitution, claiming it would “spread racism in the country”.

The speaker of Sri Lanka’s parliament announced that a speech by TMTK MP C V Wigneswaran, referencing the indigenous nature of Tamil to the island, would not be expunged from Hansard after uproar from both government and opposition Sinhala parliamentarians.

In Wigneswaran’s speech, he opened with some sentiments in Tamil and then said in English, 

“I start my felicitation Honourable Speaker, hailing you in my mother tongue, the oldest living language of this world. And the language of the first indigenous inhabitants of this country”.

The families of the disappeared in the North-East have called on the international community to “accelerate the process to proclaim a meaning justice” in an “appropriate and timely manner” for those who were forcibly disappeared, in a letter sent to the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC).

Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake reportedly supported the abolition of the Provincial Council system in Sri Lanka in remarks made this week, according to News Wire.

Last month marked 10 years since the MV Sun Sea docked in Esquimalt, B.C., carrying 380 men, 63 women and 49 Tamil children fleeing a genocide perpetrated against them by the Sri Lankan government. However, a decade on from the arrival of the boat, many of the refugees still face a precarious situation in Canada. 

An event was held in Victoria to mark its anniversary outside the legislature last month, with dozens of Tamils gathered. Speeches were given by those who came on the boat and their children, with a candle lit vigil in the evening.