SRI LANKA: Tamil woman detained without charge for almost four years

Tamil woman detained without charge for almost four years

SRI LANKA: Denial of due process rights; long detention without trial

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We wish to alert you to a case of serious miscarriage of justice in Sri Lanka. A young Tamil woman, Ms. Victor Joyce Scholastica, has been imprisoned for almost four years under the Prevention of Terrorism Act on the vague charge that she had allegedly \”made a sign or a gesture which could be a sign, to two purported accomplices\”. Her family believes that she is being held in prison as a substitute prisoner for her former fiance, who is not in the country.
FACTS OF THE CASE

Ms. Scholastica was arrested in Vavuniya by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Kandy on about April 8, 1998, and is being held in the Welikada Prison. Since her arrest, there have been no direct legal charges made against her. She has been produced before high courts 17 times with constant delays. But the date for a trial has yet to be fixed. When the case was called for the seventeenth time on 06.02.2001, it was yet again postponed until Feburary 2002, condemning the poor woman to languish in jail for a whole year longer.

Before her arrest, Ms. Scholastica, who was 29 at the time of her arrest, worked in the post office in Gurunagar on the Jaffna Peninsula. She was displaced by a military operation in Jaffna in 1996, came by boat to Vanni and stayed with the Rev. Anton Alexander of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Vavuniya. She was indicted in the High Court in Kandy on June 11, 1999 (case No. 1288/1999)
BACKGROUND

We have appealed to you many times to put pressure on the prosecutions system in Sri Lanka for fundamental reform so that cases such as this no longer occur. Your efforts are finally paying off, as there is now some debate and pressure building within Sri Lanka, especially regarding this case of Ms. Scholastica. The following is from a letter to the editor of The Island (Sri Lankan newspaper) by Basil Fernando, in response to yesterday’s editorial on the case of Ms. Scholastica:

\”The inhumane suffering experienced by those who seek justice in the current system is difficult to describe….. However, delays are tied to a much deeper malaise of the system. Some make profit out of the system’s failures and others are too frustrated and hence suffer in silence. If all instances of injustice caused by the system are brought to public notice, then a public debate capable of generating adequate pressure to force changes may take place. We may be able to overcome sufferings caused to us by our very primitive justice administration system. In many countries in Asia itself things have changed a great deal.\”
SUGGESTED ACTION

Please write to the Attorney General, with copies to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Justice in Sri Lanka and ask that Ms. Scholastica be released immediately pending her trial, and that no further postponement of her case take place.
 

To support this case, please click here: SEND APPEAL LETTER