DPA
Colombo
More than 200 members of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority have launched a hunger strike against their ongoing detention without conviction under security laws, a prison official said yesterday.
The prisoners, suspected of links with the former Tamil rebels, have been refusing food in 14 jails since Monday, demanding that their cases be expedited or that they be released, said Rohana Pushpakumara, the commissioner general of prisons.
“We will be forwarding their demands to the president,” he said.
At least 169 of the hunger strikers have not even been charged, with the other trials progressing very slowly. They are held under the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTI), introduced mainly to fight the separatist rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The Tamil National Alliance party and international rights groups have called for the law to be scrapped or amended, as the LTTE was defeated in 2009, ending the civil war.
“The government has pledged to the UN Human Rights Council that the PTA will be repealed,” a Tamil legislator, M A Sumanthiran, said.
“So they should release those detained under the PTA before repealing it.”
The legislator said that since the government had rehabilitated and freed some 12,000 former Tiger fighters after defeating the rebels in 2009, there was no sense keeping the long-term
detainees in prison.
Another Tamil politician, Northern Province Chief Minister C V Wigneswaran, wrote a letter to President Maithripala Sirisena saying there was concern that the hunger-striking prisoners might be dealt with violently by prison officers as, he said, had happened in the past.
He said inmates should be categorised, with some freed and others bailed - or charges swiftly filed and cases heard.
The total number of Tamil prisoners still held under the law could be more than 650, according to rights groups.
The government has not published the information, but the new administration, elected in January, is working with the International Committee of the Red Cross to draw up the list, said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN’s human rights chief, last month.
Nearly 30 prisoners of varied ethnicities died in prisons during rioting in 2012.
Wigneswaran said a list of the Tamil prisoners could be prepared “within one week”.