The Canadian government has denied visas to two of Sri Lanka’s leading prison department officials, due to the country's human rights violations, The Island reported on Friday.

A senior prison officer told The Island he was surprised that the Canadian High Commission had made such an allegation as the prison officers were engaged in rehabilitating LTTE cadres and reintegrating them into society.

"At the last presidential election, Western countries had a plan and they worked and funded it. It was finding a person who could give a good fight to President Mahinda Rajapaksa there by diverting the support of the parties like the TNA and JVP to that candidate. They found former Army Commander Sarath Fonseka and went according to the plan, but failed as the people had confidence in the President," he added.

A non-violent campaign to effect the merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces, and other issues raised at the recent Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi convention, will be conducted if the Sri Lankan government does not address them by the end of the year, said Tamil National Alliance MP MA Sumanthiran in an interview to the Sunday Leader.

The MP said “deliberate state sponsored colonisation” was ongoing, with a view to “change the ethnic demography of the area”. Sumanthiran said that the northeast is the “historic habitation of Tamil-speaking people, and “systematic state-sponsored colonisation of Sinhalese” has been ongoing in the east.

“Sinhala settlement growth rate in East was several times higher than the birth rate of Sinhalese in the country,” he said.

“It is unethical and deliberate alteration of the demography. This has been a historic issue.”

Sumanthiran said that the TNA will carry out protests if the issues which were addressed at the recent ITAK convention are not addressed by the end of the year.

The exclusion of some NGOs from a human rights conference at the behest of the Sri Lankan government was criticised by the Sri Lanka Campaign, who say the conference, in its current form, will do damage to human rights on the island.

The Sri Lankan army is in the midst of constructing a statue of a mythical Sinhala giant, who fought against the Tamil Chola King Ellalan in a Tamil village in the Vanni.

Lawyers who filed cases against the Sri Lankan government and a controversial Buddhist monk were threatened by armed masked men and warned that they would be killed if they continue their legal action.

Masked men had rushed into the offices of lawyer Namal Rajapakshe in Colombo this week, one of whom had been armed. The men warned that Rajapakshe and fellow lawyer Manjula Pathiraja would be killed if they pressed forward with “unnecessary cases”.

“We urge this council to exert pressure on Sri Lanka to cooperate with the UN inquiry and to ensure the safety of witnesses, as the only means of achieving meaningful accountability and justice for the killing of tens of thousands of Tamils at the end of the armed conflict.”