Media Coverage

A Sri Lankan court has sentenced a former police chief and a former Defense Ministry official to death after finding them guilty of criminal negligence for the Easter Sunday bombings that killed 260 people in 2019. Former Police Chief Pujith Jayasundara and former Defense Ministry Secretary Hemasiri...

Sri Lanka’s most recently unearthed mass grave has led to the discovery of 19 bodies, including those of three babies. The discovery of the mass grave has reopened old wounds for Sri Lanka’s Tamil community, which suffered the worst violence of the island’s 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan...

Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake won Sri Lanka’s presidential election, the Election Commission announced Sunday, after voters rejected the old political guard that has been widely accused of pushing the South Asian nation into economic ruin.  Dissanayake, whose pro-working class and anti...

Making a statement at the 56th session of the UN Human Rights Council, the Core Group on Sri Lanka called on the government to "address the suffering caused by enforced disappearances" following a report by the UN High Commissioner. In their statement to the UN, the Core Group, made up of Canada...

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says its report issued Monday documents abuses by the Sri Lankan government that undercut its plans for a truth and reconciliation commission. The report, titled “If We Raise Our Voice They Arrest Us: Sri Lanka’s Proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” is based on...

Sri Lanka’s president said Wednesday he will strengthen provincial governments to meet long-standing demands for self-rule from the ethnic Tamil minority, an issue that led to a bloody quarter-century civil war in the island nation. The provincial councils were introduced in Sri Lanka in 1987 after...

Sri Lanka’s former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was accused in a report released Thursday of tampering with police records in order to hamper investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he was a military officer at the height of a bloody Marxist insurrection in 1989. The report by...

Sri Lanka's parliament on Friday passed a constitutional amendment aimed at trimming presidential powers, beefing up anti-corruption safeguards​, and helping to find a way out of the country's worst financial crisis since independence—although opposition parties and civil society representatives...

Ahead of the UN Human Rights Chief’s latest report on Sri Lanka, and a likely resolution at the coming session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, the Sri Lankan government reiterated that it would not accept any external mechanism on war-time accountability. Though rejecting the possibility of...

Sri Lankan lawmakers on Wednesday elected the unpopular prime minister as their new president, a choice that risked reigniting turmoil in the South Asian nation reeling from economic collapse and months of round-the-clock protests. The crisis has already forced out one leader, and a few hundred...