Families of the disappeared (FOD) across the North-East marked 4 years of continuous roadside protests this week.

For 4 years the FOD’s demands of the whereabouts of their family members, the majority of whom had been handed over to the Sri Lankan Army at the end of the armed conflict in May 2009, continues to be ignored by the Sri Lankan government.

Speaking at an awareness protest marking 4 years of protest, Jeyavanitha Kaasipillai, head of the FOD in Vavuniya stated

The official Sri Lankan state celebration of Vesak will be held in Jaffna this year, following instructions from Prime Minister, and accused war criminal Mahinda Rajapaksa to “focus on the North and East during Vesak this year”.

Whilst accusing the UNHRC of being bias towards the state, Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary Kamal Gunaratne has denied allegations that he and the Sri Lankan armed forces committed war crimes during the armed struggle against the LTTE which ended in May 2009. 

“We are not war criminals”, said Gunaratne in an interview conducted by Ceylon Today. Addressing the interviewer, he claimed to have served his “country and its people and even you are walking freely today because I spent my entire youth in the jungle fighting the terrorists”. 

^{File photo: Sri Lankan soldiers listen to an address by Shavendra Silva on cyber warfare}

Sri Lanka’s Terrorist Investigations Division (TID) arrested a Tamil youth in Wattala last week claiming that he had posted content about the LTTE on Tik Tok, which was being monitored by the authorities ‘cyber patrol unit’.

The 25-year-old Tamil youth, who was born in Mullaitivu and living in Hatton, has since been detained by counter terror police under the widely criticised Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA).

The Sri Lankan navy’s efforts to occupy private land in Karainagar, Jaffna was thwarted by the protests of Tamil locals and politicians, last Friday (19^th February).

Following the presentation of the damning report on Sri Lanka by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet’s damning on report on Sri Lanka, several NGO’s highlighted the prevailing impunity and lack of accountability for human rights violations in Sri Lanka and the failed domestic mechanisms; urging the council to take steps to refer Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and impose sanctions on known perpetrators.

Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada

Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian Selvam Adaikalanathan warned last week that Sri Lanka’s Minister of Public Security Sarath Weerasekara “is acting towards eliminating Tamil people in the North-East”, after the minister threatened to arrest Tamil protestors and said Tamil lawmakers should have been teargassed.

Sri Lanka has finally ended it's forced cremation policy but has proposed to introduce laws to ban wearing face veils in public, continuing the ongoing discrimination faced by Muslims on the island. 

_{File photo : Gopalakrishnan Rajkumar at a protest last year.} 

The Sri Lankan Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) summoned the secretary of the Vavuniya Families of the Disappeared Association for investigation on Monday.

Responding to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet’s, damning report on Sri Lanka, members of the Core Group (UK, Canada, Germany, Montenegro, and North Macedonia) expressed alarm over the deteriorating human rights conditions in Sri Lanka whilst Sri Lanka allies accuse the UNHRC of political bias.

Alongside the Core Group, the EU, Australia, and Switzerland alongside a number of other countries voiced concern over the worsening human rights situation in Sri Lanka. Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and China, among others, alleged faith in Sri Lanka’s domestic mechanisms and accused the UN report baseless allegations.