Extrajudicial killings

Share| The 65th Anniversary of the independence of Sri Lanka occurs today and all that we are reminded of is the loss of the liberties of the people of the country. Perhaps the heroine to be remembered at this time is Rizana Nafeek who was 17-years-old when she left Sri Lanka to find employment in […]

Dear friends, The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that the government has not made any progress in the case of the death of a young man in police custody. The police attempted to throw the dead body at a garbage center but the people saw this and shouted for help. The police […]

In the seventies Sri Lanka’s descent into savagery took a qualitative plunge and since then things have become even worse. By way of explanation I should say that by ‘savage’ I do not mean the noble savage that Jean Jacques Rousseau spoke about, but rather a person living without a civic sense and responsibility. It […]

A 45 year-old woman was gang raped in the early hours of January 23 in Wijerama, Nugegoda (some reports give her age as 47). This gruesome incident only received a few lines in some of the newspapers and in the media. Yet a similar incident that occurred in New Delhi, India, when a medical student […]

We reproduce below the letter written to His Excellency the President of Sri Lanka, the Hon. Mahinda Rajapaksa regarding the case of Mr. Wengadasalam Sudeshkar who faces the death sentence by beheading in Doha, Qatar. The AHRC urges its readers to write to the President of Sri Lanka at the address shown below to urgently […]

(Hong Kong, January21, 2013) The Asian Human Rights Commission on Monday released a special dossier of recent cases of arrest, detention, torture and extortion carried out by Burma military and police personnel in Kachin State. The 36 cases from 2012 have all been conducted under the Unlawful Associations Act, 1908, a draconian colonial-era statute under […]

(Hong Kong, January 18, 2013) Dozens of Hong Kong-based migrant workers, including Sri Lankans; migrant and human rights groups, protested today the execution of Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan maid, in Saudi Arabia. (Photos courtesy of APMM) Nafeek was executed on January 9 for the death of her employer’s child. The Government of the Kingdom […]

“Nothing’s ever gone too far. Anything can be reversed; these are human decisions.”  – Noam Chomsky (An interview with the Al Jazeera- Jan 12 ) President Rajapaksa does what he wishes to do. That should not surprise us as this is simply who he is. He impeached the Chief Justice saying that the law was […]

15 January 2013, 6:03 am We, the undersigned, condemn in the strongest terms the beheading of Rizana Nafeek, the Sri Lankan domestic migrant worker convicted aged 17 in 2005, for the accidental death of an infant, in Saudi Arabia on the morning of 09 January 2013. We are shocked at the decision of Saudi Arabia’s […]

(Note: We reproduce below the text of the letter written to the UN High Commissioner and the President of Sri Lanka requesting to cause an inquiry into the verdict and the execution of Rizana Nafeek who was executed in Saudi Arabia on January 9.) The AHRC requests all concerned persons to write to the UN […]

An unprecedented protest is unfolding in the Balochistan city of Quetta in Pakistan. Thousands of people have staged a sit-in, and are using coffins to block a road to protest the slaughter of Shia Muslims by Sunni Muslim terrorists allied with the Taliban. On Thursday night, January 10, twin bombings targeting Pakistan’s tiniest ethnic minority, the Hazaras — descendants of Central […]

Both the United Kingdom Foreign Office and France issued statements condemning the killing of Rizana Nafeek. However, the Sri Lankan government which expressed sadness about the killing did not make any statement specifically condemning the killing. Commenting on reports that Sri Lankan national, Ms Rizana Nafeek, was executed yesterday in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, […]

The International Commission against the Death Penalty (ICDP) condemns today’s execution of Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan housemaid, in Saudi Arabia. She was beheaded in Dawadmi province near Riyadh. Rizana, a teenage domestic worker, was condemned to death after a four-month-old baby boy she was bottle-feeding choked and died in 2005. According to her birth […]

Dear friends, The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) condemns reports that the government of Nepal has been putting pressure on the Attorney General Office and Police Headquarters to halt investigations into the abduction and murder of a journalist, Dekendra Raj Thapa, by Maoist cadres in Dhailekh District in 2004, at the heart of the decade […]

Sri Lankan teenager Rizana Nafeek arrived in Saudi Arabia to work as a house maid when she was 17 years of age. ‘Our family was having hardships and so our eldest daughter volunteered to go and work abroad to send money home,’ the father Mohammed Sultan Nafeek, a wood cutter from Muthur, Trincomalee, said in […]

Dear friends, The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that military units have bombarded more than a dozen villages in three districts of Balochistan based on information about the presence of a guerilla fighter fighting for the independence of Balochistan. Independent sources claim that more than 50 persons, including women and children, were […]

“The court system is skewed against ordinary folk,” says Malinda Seneviratne, writing a comment on my last article. His argument is that the people will not defend the courts as the court system is skewed against the people. However, people do have a reason to defend even the highly inadequate and problem ridden justice system […]

Dear friends, The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that a man was burned alive by an enraged mob while he was in the custody of the police, held on the charge of blasphemy. The man was taken into the custody of the police and was kept in a police station overnight. The […]

Dear friends, The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that the Sindh provincial government has not taken any action against police officers who killed two young persons in a police encounter to settle personal issues with a high ranking police officer. The government has also closed down the inquiry that it promised through […]

Dear friends, The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) wishes to inform you that the Indonesian National Police has killed and injured pro-independence activists in a shooting in Papua. Witnesses reported the activists were instantly shot by the police despite the fact that they did not pose a threat. The police admitted shooting the victims but […]