SWANA collective members focus on a recent development in Sri Lanka. On October 26 of this year, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa released a gazette announcing his appointment of a 13-member “One Country, One Law” task force. The task force is headed by Galagoda Aaththe Gnanasara Thero, the extremist Buddhist monk who is the leader of Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist Power Force, a break-away organisation from the right-wing nationalist Jathika Hela Urumaya, National Heritage Party, that has repeatedly provoked and supported anti-Muslim and anti-Christian violence in the country. Rajapaksa declared that the task force was necessary because “no citizen should be discriminated against in the eyes of the law,” and so the task force is meant “to make a study of the implementation of the concept one country one law.” The task force has been given wide powers to study various draft acts and amendments already prepared by the justice ministry, and will submit its own amendments and proposals to the ministry and present a final report by February 28, 2022. To help us make sense of this task force and its implications, we are joined by human rights activist Ambika Satkunananthan. Ambika last joined SWANA Region Radio with the late beloved professor Dr. Qadri Ismail to speak on the anniversary of the Easter Day bombings in Sri Lanka. That show would be a fitting companion to this one.
The SWANA collective would also like to mark that December 26 is the anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that followed a 9.1 magnitude earthquake just off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The tsunami, the most devastating one in recorded history, resulted in massive 100 foot waves that crashed onto the shores of fifteen countries in South and Southeast Asia and parts of Eastern and Southern Africa. The earthquake and tsunami killed over 230,000 people collectively and displaced close to two million. We hope to soon air a show on what post-tsunami relief and reconstruction efforts have looked like in Sri Lanka, so please follow us and stay tuned for that show.
Ambika Satkunanathan is currently a Fellow of the Open Society Foundations. For more than twenty years she has worked with community organizations and communities impacted by human rights violations, in particular, assisting them access remedies. From Oct 2015 to March 2020, she was a Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, where she led the first ever national study of prisons. She continues to work on the rights of imprisoned persons and re-imagining the carceral approach of the criminal justice system. Her current work includes research, advocacy and interventions on drug control, detention and rehabilitation in Sri Lanka, as part of which her research on the issue, the first such study, was published by Harm Reduction International in August 2021. She is a member of the Expert Panel of the Trial Watch Project of the Clooney Foundation and a member of the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. She is an affiliate of the Eleos Justice Centre, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. She has a B.A. and LL.B from Monash University and a LL.M from University of Nottingham where she was a Chevening Fellow.
