April 13, 2012
The alleged abduction and the subsequent release of Premakumar Gunaratnam and Dimuthu Attygalle, two key leaders of the breakaway JVP Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) in Sri Lanka, reveal the importance of ‘international pressure’ in safeguarding human rights of people in any country, including the right to life, at least as a ‘necessary evil’ under trying conditions of suppression of dissent and threats of enforced ‘disappearances,’ ‘torture’ and ‘extra-judicial killings.’
Prof. Laksiri Fernando
The alleged abduction and the subsequent release of Premakumar Gunaratnam and Dimuthu Attygalle, two key leaders of the breakaway JVP Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) in Sri Lanka, reveal the importance of ‘international pressure’ in safeguarding human rights of people in any country, including the right to life, at least as a ‘necessary evil’ under trying conditions of suppression of dissent and threats of enforced ‘disappearances,’ ‘torture’ and ‘extra-judicial killings.’It is believed that during the last six months or so, over 50 persons and mainly political activists and journalists have disappeared from the streets of Colombo and Jaffna in Sri Lanka, and two of them were Lalith Kumar Weeraraj and Kugan Muruganathan who belonged to the same political movement as Gunaratnam and Attygalle. The previous two disappeared in Jaffna on the Human Rights Day on 10 December 2011 and their whereabouts are still unknown.
Luckily this time, Premakumar Gunaratnam was a dual citizen of Australia and Sri Lanka and the Australian government brought pressure on the security establishment of the country to release Gunaratnam, along with other missions and UN agencies. As a result, Ms Attygalle also was released relatively unharmed. This matter was handled quite delicately on the Australian side by the Australian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Ms Robyn Mudie, who is supposed to have immense experience in human rights matters.
