AHRC News

The impeachment is not about the individual that is Shriyani Bandaranayake, the Chief Justice. The real issue is about ending the position of the judiciary as a separate branch of the state. What is n...

An Open Letter from the Asian Human Rights Commission to the Judges of Sri Lanka Honourable Judges: I am writing on behalf of the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) under extraordinary circumstances...

Just weeks after the speech of the Foreign Minister at the UN Human Rights Council in which she explained that the government had placed a moratorium on death sentences since 2008, a condemn man was t...

The constitutional wisdom of a people is the last resort that the people have when they are faced with constitutional peril. It is an almost unanimous opinion in Sri Lanka that the country is faced wi...

Mr. Wali Khan Baber, a correspondent of a television channel, the Geo News, was shot dead on January 13, 2011 when he was going to home after performing his duty. He was prominent on the reporting of ...

The visit of President Obama to Cambodia between November 17-20 should be an occasion to ask some vital and serious questions regarding the commitment of the United States, the European Union, the Uni...

Pakistan was reelected to the UN Human Rights Council with a thumping majority vote. It was one of the highest votes received by any country and it somehow managed to do this with a human rights recor...

Mr. Sarath N. Silva has taken three different positions in regard to the impeachment of the Chief Justice within a quite a short time. Initially, he said that, under the provisions of the 1978 constit...

An Open Letter from the Asian Human Rights Commission to the Chairperson, National Human Rights Commission of Bangladesh; case of Mr. Razzak justifies AHRC’s position about the NHRC of Banglades...

An Article by the Asian Human Rights Commission SRI LANKA: 1000 days after the disappearance of Pradeep Ekenailiagoda, Sandya writes to President Rajapakse Appeal on behalf of families of the disappea...

There was a period in the past when many rights including fair trial and the freedom of opinion and expression was heavily restricted by both authoritarian and military dictatorship governments. Those...

Once again, the country’s judiciary has underlined the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with the police in India. On 7 November, the Chief Justice of Karnataka High Court, Justic...

The Asian Human Rights Commission has written to the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions regarding the incident at the Welikada Prison in Sri Lanka on November 9, 2012...

India, the largest democracy in the world, today is slowly becoming the worst democracy in the world. The notion of democracy in the country today has got limited to just voting once in five years tha...

When I talked to a Sri Lankan friend about the killings of prisoners which happened yesterday and tried to convince him that people should demand justice, his instance reply was, “ Dhang justice na...

Basil Fernando Humankind has at least a few millenniums of experience in keeping prisons. It is part of the unfortunate predicament of humanity that there is this need to have prisons. However, over t...

Mr. Gordon Brown, UN Special Envoy for Global Education, has declared November 10, a global day of action in support of Malala and girls’ right to education. Malala Yousafzai, an ardent campaigner f...

Yesterday (9th of October), at least 11 prisoners were gunned down and around 35 were injured by the STF. The shooting was carried out when the STF entered the Welikada prison for some inspections. (P...

Basil Fernando The Chief Justice (CJ) has refuted all allegations made against her contained in the much publicized impeachment motion filed in parliament. (File Photo of the Chief Justice, Mrs. Shira...

A comparison with the Titanic is most appropriate. Titanic at the time was thought of as a wonder ship that could never sink. It was not expected ever to perish. Sri Lanka also was considered a wonder...