Controversial emergency regulation in response to Sri Lanka's food shortages were passed yesterday with a vote of 132 for and 51 against.
The regulations will enable the military to seize stock from traders, who they alledge are hording products, and transfer them into state establishments where they will be sold at government-mandated prices.

Militarisation

Today marks 25 years since the Chemmani massacre of 1996, in which Sri Lankan soldiers raped and murdered Tamil schoolgirl, Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, and three of her family members that had gone looking for her.

Krishanthi Kumaraswamy was an A Level student at Chundikili High School who was kidnapped, gang raped and viciously murdered by Sri Lankan soldiers and police officers on September 7th 1996. Three of her family members who went in search of her were also brutally murdered. 

Former postmaster turned LTTE interpreter, Velupillai Kumaru Pancharatnam, affectionately referred to as George Master, passed away at the age of 85 on Sunday.

Sri Lankan police investigated the leader of the Hindu extremist organisation Siva Senai, Maru Sachithananthan for using the word 'Eelam' on a memorial monument erected to commemorate the forcibly disappeared people in the Maravanpulavu area in Jaffna. 

The body of a Jaffna-based independent Tamil journalist who died of COVID-19 last week, was cremated yesterday. 

Sri Lankan parliament is set to debate the controversial tax amnesty bill which seeks to enable those who have not disclosed any taxable incomes or assets to immediately invest the equivalent amount in the country and pay a voluntary disclosure at one per cent nominal tax.

As garment workers across Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are forced to work in precarious conditions during the pandemic, over 50 labour advocacy groups have called on the governments of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to protect workers.

The joint statement warns that “Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi workers must choose between death and destitution”.

Jaffna parliamentarian C.V. Wigneswaran criticised President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's imposition of emergency on the island and called it an attempt to pre-empt the people from “rising up” against him. “This is a crucial step towards totalitarianism,” he added. 

Wigneswaran said that the COVID-19 pandemic is a pretext for the emergency and suggested that, instead of invoking such a law, the president should’ve passed a disaster relief legislation. 

"The tiger has always been an integral part of Tamil history."

Tamil students at the University of Glasgow have launched its first Tamil society, marking a spread of the vibrant Tamil student culture which already exists in England to another European country. 

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) has criticised the Sri Lankan government's Kafkaesque handling of the COVID-19 pandemic as one which “undermines freedom of expression”.  

Journalists, doctors and social media users have been threatened and harassed by the government for criticising the state response to the COVID-19 pandemic. ICJ notes that critics have been questioned by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and some have gone on to be arrested and detained for weeks for allegedly posting “fake news” on social media. "The government’s intimidation of people who raises questions about measures to respond to COVID-19 serve to undermine, not advance, efforts to stop the spread of the pandemic,” said Ian Seiderman, ICJ’s Legal and Policy Director.