Impunity Watch Reporter, AsiaCOLOMBO, Sri Lanka- On Monday, Sri Lanka’s court of appeal freed on bail a Tamil editor who was sentenced to 20 years in prison last year.
J.S. Tissainayagam, who edited the North Eastern Monthly magazine in Colombo, was arrested in 2008 and charged with inciting violence in articles for his magazine. A court official said that Mr. Tissainayagam was told to surrender his passport and to post 50,000 rupees ($437 dollars) in bail pending a full appeal hearing. He has appealed his conviction in August on charges of raising money for terrorism and of causing racial hatred through his writing about Tamils affected by the country’s 37-year seperatist conflict.
Mr. Tissainayagam’s case has received widespread attention in Sri Lanka, and international rights groups have been campaigning for his release. The European Union, the United States and international press freedom groups have condemned the 20 year sentence in jail with hard labor. The sentence given to Mr. Tissainayagam’s was the harshest given to a Sri Lankan Journalist in recent years.
Mr. Tissainayagam, who was found guilty of “causing communal disharmony”, was among the handful of journalists mentioned last May by President Barack Obama, who called Mr. Tissainayagam and others “emblematic examples” of a persecuted journalist.
In October, Sri Lankan courts acquitted S. Jaseeharan, publisher of North Eastern Monthly and his wife on the charges of supporting terrorism. All three were detained in March 2008 for articles published in the magazine.
In September, Mr. Tissainayagam was given an award for courageous and ethical journalism by the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders. In addition, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists selected him as a recipient of a 2009 International Press Freedom Award. He was also the first recipient of the Peter Mackler Award, set up in memory of Associated Foreign Press journalist Peter Mackler.
In May 2008, the Sri Lankan government defeated the Tamil Tigers rebels fighting for a separate homeland for the ethnic Tamil minority. The United Nations estimates that up to 100,000 people were killed in the separatist conflict which erupted in 1972.
Official figures show nine journalists have been killed and 27 assaulted in the past three years in Sri Lanka, while activists say over a dozen journalists have been killed.
For more information, please see:
BBC News- Sri Lankan Editor JS Tissainayagam Gets Bail– 11 January 2010
AFP- Sri Lanka Court Frees Tamil Editor On Bail– 11 January 2010
Greenslade Blog- Tamil Editor Freed For Appeal– 11 January 2010
