Search Results for: sri lanka

Following years of research and failed private conferences, Washington, DC, based civil rights group Muslim Advocates initiated legal proceedings against Facebook and its top executives Thursday for allowing anti-Muslim hate speech to “run rampant” on the social-media platform. Muslim Advocates alleges in their complaint that by “seeding and cultivating anti-Muslim bigotry amongst its users,” Facebook [...]

Much controversy surrounds the use of the flags associated with the Sri Lankan people, mainly because they are loaded with ethnic symbolism in a country recovering from a generation-long civil war along ethno-nationalist lines. The flags of concern here all feature big cats as central to their designs. Big cats, wherever they occur, have been [...]

The UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday adopted a resolution to promote reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka. The resolution, which was drafted in response to a damning UN report released in January, stresses the importance of an accountability process for parties who engage in violence and human rights abuses, naming the Liberation [...]

In 2006 as the Human Rights Council was being set up, I wrote an opinion piece on this website in which I shared, among other aspects, my impressions as to how the Council would shape up. Experience thus far produced mixed assessment. The transition from the Commission to the Council took a couple of years, [...]

Officials in Sri Lanka announced plans this weekend to ban burqas in public and close more than 1,000 Islamic schools. These policies are the latest in a string of decisions targeting the country’s Muslim minority. Citing national security concerns, Sri Lanka’s public security minister Sarath Weerasekera signed papers for cabinet approval of the ban on [...]

Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Health on Thursday revised a controversial mandatory cremation order for persons who have died from COVID-19. The government had issued the cremation order at the beginning of the global pandemic last year, over concerns that burying bodies of COVID-19 victims could potentially contaminate ground water. World Health Organization guidance from the same [...]

It has been almost 12 years since the civil war in Sri Lanka came to an end after the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Since 2009, there has been a concerted effort to hold perpetrators accountable for the mass killings against Tamil citizens, there has also been a governmental committee set [...]

UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet raised concern over increasing human rights violations by state and military officials in Sri Lanka in a UN report published on Wednesday. Bachelet also suggested the imposition of sanctions on military officials in Sri Lanka accused of war crimes and several human rights violations. The report highlights the negative impact [...]

The Parliament of Sri Lanka Thursday passed the Twentieth Amendment to the country’s constitution, repealing a past administration’s limitations on presidential powers and expansion of parliamentary powers. The amendment has raised concerns that authoritarian President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s power has become unbounded. The amendment was passed in the Sri Lankan House by a vote of 156-65. [...]

As the armed forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan, in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Caucasus, slug it out over a decades-long dispute about a piece of ground, one is reminded that conflict, once again, has become dirty and lawless at many levels. Civilians have become targets, protective symbols of the Geneva Conventions, such as the [...]