Sri Lankan rights activist Sithie Tiruchelvam passes away

Sithie Tiruchelvam and Neelan Tiruchelvam were committed constant engagement for peace and social justice.

Noted lawyer and Sri Lankan human rights activist Sithie Tiruchelvam, wife of the internationally respected academic Neelan Tiruchelvan, passed away here on Saturday after a brief illness.

She was 69.

Ms. Tiruchelvam, along with Neelan Tiruchelvam — one of the foremost, erudite activists of Sri Lanka who worked on a devolution package and championed the political rights of Tamils — is known for her deep engagement with the cause of social justice and peace.

In addition to collaborating with him at Tiruchelvam Associates, a leading Colombo-based law firm that they established together, Ms. Tiruchelvam contributed significantly to the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) and the Law and Society Trust. The institutions are highly regarded research and policy organisations founded by Tiruchelvam, who served the Sri Lankan parliament in the 1990s representing the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), before he was assassinated by the LTTE in 1999.

Friends and colleagues fondly remember Ms. Tiruchelvam as one of the most committed rights activists who passionately created a space for interaction of intellectuals not just from Sri Lanka, but from all over the world. “Their living room was open to everyone,” said Radhika Coomaraswamy, former U.N. Under-Secretary-General, and close friend of Sithie. “She provided an intellectual space for people from all ethnic groups. She would go the extra mile to help someone.”

Terming her death a big loss to the legal fraternity and to human rights activism, Jayantha Dhanapala, member of the Friday Forum, a prominent Colombo-based civil society organisation, said “Sri Lanka cannot afford to lose people like her.”

Ms. Tiruchelvam was on the board of several leading companies in Sri Lanka. In addition to law and human rights, she was deeply interested in literature and arts. She also mentored young lawyers and activists, giving them a solid grounding in politics and contemporary social issues. Friends observed that her efforts in running the Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust, set up after the assassination of her husband, were remarkable in carrying forward his intellectual legacy.

Report exposes rights abuse by Sri Lankan forces post war

Military is still waging a campaign of persecution using abduction, arbitrary detention and sexual violence’

A report by rights groups on Friday said there was enough evidence that the Sri Lankan military was still waging a war against Tamils.

The report — published by the UK Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales and the International Truth & Justice Project, Sri Lanka — is one of the first documents to detail alleged rights abuse by the Sri Lankan armed forces in the post-war context.

Five years after the brutal war ended with the defeat of the rebel Tigers, the military was still waging a campaign of persecution, resorting to abduction, arbitrary detention, torture, rape and sexual violence, the report said.

Leading South African human rights lawyer and U.N. adviser Yasmin Sooka compiled the report, based on interviews with 40 Tamils who were reportedly held in custody by Sri Lankan authorities and who later sought refuge in the U.K.

The report, ‘Unfinished War: Torture and Sexual Violence in Sri Lanka, 2009- 2014,’ comes ahead of the U.N. Human Rights Council debate in Geneva on a U.S.-led resolution, calling for an international investigation into alleged war crimes and rights abuse in Sri Lanka.

“Sworn statements, along with medical and psychiatric examinations, have been gathered from dozens of Tamil men and women who sought refuge in the U.K. after being subjected to abuses in Sri Lanka. Almost all incidents they described took place after the war, some of them as recently as February 2014,” the report said.

Their accounts, documented by nine independent lawyers from western and Asian countries, established a case to answer for post-war crimes against humanity involving torture, rape and sexual violence — including anal rape and forced oral sex — by the Sri Lankan military, the report said.

South African rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in his foreword, said it “gives the lie to the Sri Lankan government’s propaganda that it is reconciling with its former enemies.”

The Sri Lankan army has been denying allegations of war crimes and rights abuse, maintaining that it was part of an anti-Sri Lanka campaign by some sections of the Tamil diaspora that supported the LTTE.