Following the recent arrest and continued detention of three Tamil doctors–Thangamuttu Sathiyamorthi, Thurairaja Varatharajan and V. Sunmugarajah –by the Sri Lankan military after they supplied local and international news media with causality figures in Vanni during the last stages of the war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, we issued this statement…
“Information is power, which is precisely why many governments attempt to control the press to suppress opposition and preempt dissent,” said U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who three years ago founded the Congressional Caucus for Freedom of the Press. “Far too often, the reporters and editors who demand reform, accountability, and transparency find…
Sri Lanka got special mention in the statements of world leaders marking World Press Freedom Day, May 3. It’s not surprising. The government in Colombo has coupled an all-out effort to end its war with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam with an assault on critics in the Sri Lankan media. U.S. President Barack…
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…