Photograph Pathivu

Thousands of British Tamils marched through London on Friday afternoon calling for an UN referendum on an independent state of Tamil Eelam.

Rejecting Sri Lanka's LLRC, protesters called for an investigation into the genocide of Tamils by the Sri Lankan state and demanded "action, not words". Drawing attention to the Sri Lankan state's use of rape as a weapon of war, British Tamils condemned the Sri Lankan state's destruction of the Tamil nation.

Photograph Pathivu

Protesters also expressed solidarity with the protests of the Tamil Nadu students and welcomed the Tamil Nadu State Assembly's call for a referendum across the Eelam Tamil nation.

Sri Lanka's Cricket Board announced on Friday that it had written a private letter to the “Ravana Balaya” Buddhist group addressing their condemnation of the Board's decision to allow Sri Lankan cricketers to play in the Indian Premier League.

Six Indian parliamentarians will visit Sri Lanka next week, reported The Hindu on Friday.

The delegation includes Saugata Roy (Trinamool Congress), Sandeep Dikshit (Congress), Anurag Thakur (BJP), Dhananjay Singh (BSP), Goud Yaskhi (Congress) and Prakash Javadekar (BJP), along with members of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) who organised the trip.

During the visit, the group will visit Colombo and Jaffna and is expected to meet senior ministers and political leaders.

Sri Lankan government Minister Mervyn Silva has warned India not to "wake the lion" in an interview given to the Daily Mirror.

in a video posted on the Daily Mirror, the Minister is seen receiving blessing from a Buddhist monk before speaking. He went on to say,

“We have a good relationship with Tamil Nadu and our president in all his wisdom will solve this issue. But I’m telling South India that it should not awaken the sleeping lion and injure itself”.

Greens immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young has slammed Australia's "shadowy process" of rejecting asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, as Australian authorities sent back another batch of 20 failed asylum seekers to the island. 

The return brings the total number of asylum seekers sent to Sri Lanka to 936, with 756 having been involuntary.

The leader of the Liberal party in Canada, Bob Rae, has called for his country to boycott the forthcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan government will raise $44.3 million from India in order to develop Kankesanthurai Harbour in Jaffna for commercial use, reported the DailyMirror on Thursday.

“We have decided to get this loan. The interest rate is being negotiated. We believe it will be a concessionary loan,” an unnamed official at the Ports Development Ministry said.

Read more here.

Human Rights Watch's legal and policy director, James Ross, criticised the stance of The Philippines at the UNHRC on a resolution about accountability in Sri Lanka.

Writing in The Philippine Daily Inquirer, Ross said:

"The Philippine government has been winning international praise for enacting pro-rights legislation, including criminalizing enforced disappearances, providing reparations for martial law victims, and promoting reproductive rights. So it is baffling—and disturbing—that a democracy led by a president who himself was a victim of human rights abuse would side with Sri Lanka’s increasingly authoritarian government.

It’s little surprise that most of the countries voting against the Sri Lanka resolution were from Asia. Sri Lankan diplomats evidently played the “Asian solidarity” card to get their “no” votes and abstentions. One would have hoped that President Aquino’s administration would be beyond this transparently superficial approach to foreign affairs and would instead address these issues in a serious way.

Speaking to The Island, Suren Surendiran of the Global Tamil Forum, asserted that the international community and India in particular should bring Sri Lanka to its knees using measures similar to those adopted against Apartheid South Africa.

Arguing that the banning of Sri Lankan cricket players was not enough, Surendiran called for 'collective action' similar to the banning of all white South African sports teams at international events.

Writing in the Asian Correspondent, the former BBC journalist and author of Still Counting The Dead, criticised the arts festival Colomboscope which was funding by the British Council.

See here. Reproduced in full below:

'Perhaps most shocking was that they came in military uniform to an arts festival. It could have been a bold move to include a session on war reporting in the latest literary event in the Sri Lankan capital – Colomboscope. Sponsored by Standard Chartered Bank and organised by the British Council and Goethe Institute, the boundaries of freedom of expression should at least have been nudged forward a little.

But three of the four-member panel were government spokesmen. The only dissenting voice a very articulate German war correspondent, who didn’t seem to have actually reported on the end of the war in 2009 (another journalist was invited, but later pulled out). She looked increasingly frustrated and uncomfortable as the session proceeded and she came under attack as part of an undefined western conspiracy against Sri Lanka. Her words about coming to terms with the past were applauded by the audience but made little impact on the panelists bent on rewriting history to their advantage.