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JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Navanethem Pillay, who on Friday became the first person of Tamil heritage to win the Nobel Peace Prize, said in an address honoring the slain Tamil legislator Neelan Tiruchelvam that over the past 50 years the international community had responded to crimes against humanity with "tolerance of impunity rather than enforcement of the rule of law." The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Ms. Pillay, 85, the prize for her efforts to promote peace and international law, saying she

OSLO — Navanethem Pillay, the South African jurist whose demands for an international investigation into the final months of Sri Lanka’s civil war made her a defining figure for war-affected Tamils and a target of the Rajapaksa government, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honoring Ms. Pillay, 85, known as Navi, for her work to advance “a more comprehensive global legal order” and to ensure that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocid

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam The president told senior clergy that the drafters of Sri Lanka’s prison regulations may not have expected monks to be imprisoned. Colonial records show monks tried for treason, jailed in Jaffna and Kandy, and executed in their robes before the law was written. A court ruled on a monk stripped of his robes in prison more than a century ago. JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — More than 120 years ago, a Buddhist monk walked out of a colonial prison in Ceylon without his robes. The pris

By: Asela Kuruluwansha COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The heads of Sri Lanka's four main Buddhist monastic orders have objected to the prison authorities' decision to bring the jailed nationalist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero to court in lay clothing, saying that only the Buddhist clergy can decide whether a monk loses his ordained status. In a letter to the commissioner general of prisons, the prelates said that no council of monks had found Gnanasara Thero guilty of a pārājika, the gravest cate

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Oct. 7, 2026 On Tuesday, Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara presented the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill to Parliament. It would repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1979, a law successive governments promised to abolish and kept using. The same day, the Government Printer released a second bill under his name, the Prevention of Organised Crimes Bill, which the government says will give effect to the United Nations Convention aga

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — The knife used to kill Anne Laksha Ignatius, the 31-year-old culinary and hospitality instructor stabbed inside her family home in Nallur on Monday, was a professional meat-cutting knife taken from the kitchen of the Jaffna hotel where her suspected killer worked, people familiar with the investigation said. The suspect, Thevathas Pugalarasan, worked at NorthGate, the hotel on Station Road near the Jaffna railway station. The knife was used for cutting meat in the hotel's ki

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Nineteen years after Sahathevan Nilakshan, a 22-year-old journalism student and magazine editor, was shot dead at his family's home during a military curfew, the University of Jaffna on Wednesday awarded a gold medal bearing his name to the top student in its Media Studies program. The Sahathevan Nilakshan Memorial Gold Medal went to Thanushka Sanjeewa, a graduate from Trincomalee who finished first in her batch. It was presented on Oct. 7, the second day of the university's