Sri Lanka / Asia

We issued the following statement today in response to international news reports that a Sri Lankan court released journalist Nadesapillai Vithyatharan without charge after nearly two months in jail for allegedly supporting a terrorist attack on the capital, Colombo…

The office of Uthayan, a Tamil-language daily, in Jaffna was hit with an explosive device around 11 p.m. on March 24, 2009. Most Sri Lankan media reports identified the weapon as a hand grenade. It was the fifth time in three years that the office had been attacked. 

On Tuesday, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission convened a hearing on Sri Lanka. The impetus was the disintegrating human rights situation in the northeastern “no fire zone.” CPJ was invited to testify about attacks on Sri Lankan journalists and the fact that both sides to the Tamil secessionist war–the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the government–do…

The dire situation for journalists in Sri Lanka who have fallen out of favor with the government has not gone unnoticed at the U.S. State Department. On March 23, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a letter to Senator Robert Casey, who chaired the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on Sri Lanka on February 24.…

CPJ’s Impunity Index spotlights countrieswhere journalists are slain and killers go free New York, March 23, 2009 — The already murderous conditions for the press in Sri Lanka and Pakistan deteriorated further in the past year, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found in its newly updated Impunity Index, a list of countries where journalists…

There’s a familiar pattern emerging in Sri Lanka, one we’ve seen in many countries. When the government doesn’t have a viable case against a critical journalist, prosecutors turn to state security laws to keep them in detention.

New York, March 6, 2009–A delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists met yesterday with the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United States and called for a comprehensive and transparent investigation into a series of recent attacks against the press that may have involved government forces. 

January 6, 2009: The main control room of Colombo’s TV Sirasa is bombed. January 8, 2009: Prominent independent editor Lasantha Wickramatunga is killed by a hit-squad that attacks his car while it is blocked in traffic. January 23, 2009: Pro-government editor Upali Tennakoon is attacked under similar circumstances by a similar hit-squad. He is injured, but…

New York, March 6, 2009–The Sri Lankan government should release a journalist and his two colleagues who have spent a year behind bars on terrorism charges for publishing magazine articles, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Yesterday’s arrest of Nadesapillai Vithyatharan in a suburb of Colombo was a continuation of the killing, jailing, harassing, and intimidating of Sri Lankan  journalists–and the feeling is that it if it hadn’t been for the quick response of the international community, Vithyatharan’s situation could have gotten a lot uglier.