As the polling day for the Provincial Council election nears, election related violence is on the increase according to media reports.

Complaints regarding at least 49 incidents of violence related to the forthcoming provincial elections have been lodged at various police stations in Eastern province until Saturday, May 3, according to the Police.

The UN is to charge 114 Sri Lankan soldiers who were on peace-keeping missions with sexual exploitation and abuse against children, the Sunday Times reported last week.

The UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) says it is assisting in the pending legal proceedings initiated by the Sri Lankan Government, to ensure that all military members found guilty, according to Sri Lankan law, ‘are held accountable for their actions.’

Under thick tropical rains on a rutted country road, a bus packed with ethnic Tamil families screeched to a stop here in eastern Sri Lanka. At a heavily fortified government checkpoint, the families were ordered off the bus.

They were asked many questions. Where had they come from? Why? Whom did they visit? The experience, for many of them, was more than inconvenient. It was frightening. In places like this, they said, amid bungalows battered and burned by war, people go missing.

As violence surges in Sri Lanka, so does the number of abductions and disappearance of mostly Tamil men. That is the assessment of human rights activists and international aid groups operating in the Indian Ocean nation.

In the last one year Sri Lanka’s eastern Batticaloa district has seen two rounds of mass displacements as hundreds of thousands of people fled warfare between Tamil militants and the armed forces of the country.
In late 2006 and early 2007, frightened civilians, mostly ethnic Tamils, fled their homes in areas held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as the Sri Lankan army fought its way in to dislodge the militants.

Humanitarian agencies say hundreds of children in the North are suffering from severe malnutrition, with essential supplies, including therapeutic food supplements given to severely malnourished children, yet to reach them.

According to the Kilinochchi District Hospital, more than 500 children below the age of five in the Kilinochchi District, suffer from severe malnutrition.

I had a rare opportunity to come to know closely of the details of a Black Tiger Thurairathinam Kalairaj (Ilam Puli), who became a Martyr, when the Anuradhapura Air Base was attacked by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

More than security concerns, the sentiments of Tamil Christians and their mistrust of Sri Lankan State seem to be the impelling force behind the decision of taking away Our Lady of Madu from her abode. Those who could look at how Kathirkaamam was confiscated from the predominance of Tamils and how the ancient temples behind the Tamil Saiva myth are inside ‘High Security Zones’, could understand the fear of Tamil Christians.

Liberation Tigers Political Head B. Nadesan on April 7 sent an urgent letter to Norwegian International Development Minister Erik Solheim, placing a request to the Royal Norwegian Government to take steps to immediately end the military assault of the holy Madu shrine in Mannar district.

As a humanitarian crisis unfolds, the Diaspora needs to help again.

Relatives of seventeen aid workers massacred in Sri Lanka said they did not expect justice, as a heated human rights inquiry began on March 24 into their execution-style murders more than a year ago.

Ravi Shantha, the aunt of one of the Action Contre la Faim (ACF) aid workers killed in August 2006 in the northeastern town of Muttur, told a panel of judges appointed to investigate rights abuses in Sri Lanka that too much time had passed.

An international panel invited by Sri Lanka to observe the government's probe into human rights abuses shut down operations on March 31, three weeks after accusing Colombo of failing to tackle the issue.

The International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP) was formed to observe an inquiry into 16 cases of serious rights violations, including the August 2006 massacre of 17 local employees of the French charity, Action Contra la Faim (ACF).

The leader of Sri Lanka's Buddhist monk political party is calling for a resolution to the country's 25-year war between government forces and Tamil militants. The monk, who heads a party in Sri Lanka's parliament, supports using the military to do it.