Local Features

The Law and Society Trust (LST) together with the Community Trust Fund (CTF), the People’s Secretariat (PS) and the Rural Development Foundation (RDF) has set up a Citizens’ Commission to investigate the expulsion of Muslims from the Northern Province by the LTTE in October 1990. The LTTE expulsion of Muslims from five Northern districts in October 1990 has not been …

Ashroff King Senerath, who in 1626 settled nearly 4,000 Muslims in the East of Sri Lanka following their expulsion from the island’s Western coastal belt by the Portuguese led by Captain de Saa, must be the most delighted to hear, if the dead king could, that the descendants of those whom he settled in the then Batticaloa regions had reciprocated …

The concept of Responsibility to Protect has triggered resistance in many countries of the Global South precisely because of its potential misapplication to situations such as the Sri Lankan one. Lakshman Kadirgamar, the former Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, was one of the most incisive legal minds of his generation. A former president of the Oxford Union, he made significant contributions …

It would seem that disagreeing with Izeth Hussain is an offence punishable by deportation. As he pointed out in his charming letter of June 22nd entitled ‘Go home, Kath’, I devoted one paragraph of my last article to his comments on the Human Rights Council vote. My suggestion that he might offer to hold David Miliband’s bag while he gave …

Mao wrote famously, “Power flows through the barrel of a gun.” So do Constitutions. It is true that a Constitution, the fundamental law of the people, should have behind it a broad consensus among the people, but that consensus will mean nothing at all unless it is backed by the gun, with the means of legitimate violence in the hands …

Listening to people talk since the vote in the Human Rights Council, anybody would think that Sri Lanka’s approach to international relations was now clear. Newspapers have been full of praise for Dayan Jayatilleka and the principles he has been advocating. If they were genuinely convinced, I’d be delighted. I’ve always believed that a foreign policy based on solidarity with …