Roy Samathanam, a Tamil torture survivor, who filed a civil lawsuit against Sri Lanka's former defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, described how his experience of torture at the hands of Sri Lankan security forces "never goes away" speaking in London today.
Tamil Guardian sat down with Spokesperson for the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and MP, M. A. Sumanthiran at his home in Colombo last week to discuss matters of the constitution, transitional justice and the budget. The full transcript of the hour-long interview (with minor edits) is available here . On the Constitution Mr Sumanthiran was positive on the outlook of the recently released constitutional sub-committee reports, saying that a large percentage of what they contained “would be very acceptable to Tamil aspirations”. The parliamentarian said he believes that considering the Centre-...
Tamil Guardian interviewed the Chief Minister of the Northern Provincial Council C V Wigneswaran in London last week.
File photograph: Stephen Rapp at an event in London in 2014, highlighting sexual violence by Sri Lanka soldiers. (Photograph Timothy Anderson) The international community must be “tough and supportive” towards Sri Lanka whilst the government continues to undermine “trust and confidence” by rejecting foreign participation in an accountability mechanism, said the former US Ambassador-at-large for Global Criminal Justice Stephen Rapp, in an interview with the Tamil Guardian. “Progress has been slower than it should have been,” said the former ambassador, as he spoke to the Tamil Guardian in...
Tamil Guardian caught up with Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian after his parliamentary speech on Sri Lanka’s constitutional assembly speech last week.
“I’ve always been vocal from day one about the fact that I was a refugee and not a migrant. There was no secret. I actually left Sri Lanka because we were bombed and shot at.” The global icon talks politics and life with Tamil Guardian.
As discussions on how to deal with the findings of the UN investigation into Sri Lanka’s mass atrocities (OISL) reach fever pitch, the newly elected chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils, James Berry, spoke to the Tamil Guardian last week. Speaking ahead of the release of the UN report into mass atrocities and after meeting the Chief Minister of the Northern Province, the APPG-T chair reiterated calls for normalcy in the North-East and stressed the need for any process to deal with the findings of the OISL to have the full confidence of the victims.
Sexual violence against Tamils ‘systematic’, ‘part of policy framework’: Interview with Yasmin Sooka
Photograph SL Campaign As the global summit on preventing sexual violence in conflict gets underway in London, the Tamil Guardian spoke on Tuesday to Yasmin Sooka, one of the three co-authors of the 2011 UN Panel of Experts report into wartime mass atrocities in Sri Lanka and co-author of the ' An Unfinished War: Torture and Sexual Violence in Sri Lanka 2009—2014 ' report on post-war Sri Lanka. In comments ahead of an event on Wednesday focused on sexual violence in Sri Lanka and hosted by the Canadian High Commission, Ms. Sooka, Executive Director of the Foundation for Human Rights in South...
Photograph:eKuruvi Tamil National Alliance (TNA) member of the Northern Provincial Council, MK Shivajilingam has said the people of the North-East have now demonstrated to the international community their demands for a international independent investigation, with the unanimous passing of a Northern Provincial Council (NPC) resolution. In an interview with Tamil Guardian earlier this week, Shivajilingam stated that any domestic investigation by Sri Lanka should be rejected and only an international investigation can bring progress and justice, a demand stated in a NPC resolution passed earlier this year.
Speaking to the Tamil Guardian, Indian film maker Maga Tamizh Prabhagaran condemned the procurement of Tamil land by the Sri Lankan government as part of a structural genocide, after the London screening of his film ‘This Land Belongs to the Army’. Prabhagaran, who was detained by Sri Lankan security forces whilst visiting the Tamil homeland in the North-East of the island, was eventually deported by Colombo. Upon arrival in London, Prabhagaran also described being held and interrogated for over 3 hours by British police, questioning him on the LTTE and on protests held by the Tamil diaspora. His film, detailing state procurement and Sinhalisation of the Tamil homeland, was screened at an international conference on land grabs earlier this month in London. Land grabs, the Sri Lankan state’s forcible and militarised procurement of Tamil owned land in the North-East, has seen international condemnation with a resolution having been presented to the US Senate this week outlining “ongoing concerns regarding landownership and property restitution”.