Sri Lanka

Tamil journalist JS Tissainayagam has been sentenced to 20 years hard labour on charges of supporting terrorism and inciting racial hatred, becoming the first journalist to be convicted under Sri Lanka's draconian anti-terrorism law. An English-language columnist for the Sri Lankan Sunday Times and editor of the news website OutreachSL, Tissainayagam was arrested on March 7, 2008. He spent five...

The Sri Lankan government has refused to renew the press visa of the Associated Press (AP) bureau chief in the country, Ravi Nessman. Nessman, an American national who has been based in Sri Lanka since 2007, was forced to leave the country on July 20 after his visa was not renewed. Advisor to the head of state, Lucien Rajakarunanayake, said the refusal was because foreign correspondents were not...

The Sri Lankan government is continuing its offensive against the independent news media, blocking domestic access to a news website and smearing lawyers who are representing a leading newspaper. The government launched aggressive efforts to curb independent media in 2006—at the same time it began an all-out military effort to defeat the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). On May...

The Sri Lanka government has decided to restore the former Press Council, which will have the power to pass jail sentences on journalists and newspaper publishers. The decision comes amid continuing tension between the authorities and renewed threats against Jaffna-based Tamil newspapers. “A press council can be a useful tool for managing relations between the media and the public,” Paris-based...

Officers of the Colombo Crimes Division (CCD) questioned the two journalists, editors of Sinhalese dailies, recently in an attempt to force them to reveal their sources for articles on sensitive subjects, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The editor of one of the newspapers, who asked not to be named, said members of the CCD went to his newspaper’s headquarters on the morning of June...

The general secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association, Poddala Jayantha, was abducted in Sri Lanka, beaten, and dropped by the side of a road in a Colombo suburb on Monday. The attack came on a busy road during rush hour at 5:15 p.m. Jayantha's colleagues said witnesses at the scene told them six unidentified men in a white Toyota Hi Ace van with tinted glass windows grabbed...

Sri Lankan authorities have arrested three Tamil doctors - Thangamuttu Sathiyamorthi, Thurairaja Varatharajan and V. Sunmugarajah - for providing the news media with information about the humanitarian situation in Vanni, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “The government will be held responsible if the army’s military victory is accompanied by such criminal acts of revenge...

Channel 4’s Asian correspondent Nick Paton-Walsh, producer Bessie Du, and cameraman Matt Jasper were briefly detained by police in Trincomalee in the east of the country before their expulsion. They are now in Bangkok with their journalist visas cancelled and banned from further visits to Sri Lanka, according to Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The report broadcast on May 5 showed both...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the release of the manager of the Poobalasingam Book Depot bookshop in Colombo, who was arrested by anti-terrorism police at his home in the Colombo suburb of Wellawatte on March 5 for sending copies of Ananda Vikatan, a Tamil weekly magazine published in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, to another branch of the same bookshop in Jaffna, in the...

Press freedom groups have rubbished the charges that Sri Lankan newspaper editor Nadesapillai Vithyatharan helped Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels carry out a suicide air strike on Colombo on February 20. Vithyatharan was arrested Thursday in Colombo. According to friends who were with him at the time, police detained Vithyatharan while he was attending the funeral of a friend in...