Four years after the brutal assassination of the Founding Editor-in-Chief of The Sunday Leader newspaper Lasantha Wickrematunge, the police are yet to make a breakthrough and the murderers are roaming free. Two suspects were arrested following Wickrematunge’s murder – Kandegedara Piyawansha and Pichchai Jesudasan. Piyawansha, a former military intelligence officer, was released on bail in [...]

At the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in May 2009, many hoped that this would represent a sharp break with the past and usher in a new period of media freedom. However, as the BBC Tamil Service producer Swaminathan Natarajan shows, such hopes have proved ill-founded. For his research paper,Media Freedom in [...]

Great firewall of China You’ve probably heard of the Great Firewall of China, which scrubs the web of any potentially subversive content for half a billion internet users. And you’ve definitely heard about the Egyptian government’s decision to switch off all internet and mobile-phone networks at the height of the uprising in 2011. But there [...]

IFJ Urges Attention on Free Speech As the Universal Periodic Review on Sri Lanka begins at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its partners and affiliates in Sri Lanka, urge closer attention to issues of free speech and the right to information, which have been casualties of [...]

Lasantha Wickrematunge is probably not a name most people in the Western World would recognize. His martyrdom as the editor-in-chief of Sri Lanka’s critical newspaper, The Sunday Leader was, unlike the parts that Hollywood trouble-seeking trailblazers like George Clooney or Matt Damon play, not a role he wanted. But Lasantha loved to tell the truth. [...]

Websites propagating false news sealed-MOD . The Defence Ministry said in its website that acting on a court order the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) officials, yesterday (29th June) sealed an office in Rajagiriya where two websites involved in propagating false and unethical news on Sri Lanka were being operated from. It also said that “these [...]

The government continued to arbitrarily detain, torture or ill-treat people and subject people to enforced disappearance. It failed to address most instances of impunity for violations of human rights and humanitarian law. The government rejected repeated allegations of war crimes committed by both sides of the conflict that ended in 2009, prompting Amnesty International to [...]

In May, 2003, I travelled around Iraq reporting on its oil industry. Before reaching Baghdad, I got in touch with Marie Colvin, who was there covering the war and its aftermath for the Sunday Times, where I worked from 1986 to 1993. She wrote back to say that she was staying at a hunt club [...]

Marie Colvin was always getting into jams as a foreign correspondent, covering war zones and acquiring an eye patch after an ambush in Sri Lanka, recalls her brother William Colvin. The retired NYPD detective says his big sister always had stories when she would come home to visit about how she managed to find her [...]

“I believe a journalist can change the world,” says exiled Sri Lankan journalist Sonali Samarasinghe, “if not why are we here then”. Sonali is one of three exiled journalists, from the minority Tamil and majority Sinhalese communities, whose stories are told in a new Norwegian film, Silenced Voices, by Beate Arnestadpreviewed last night at the [...]