Marking 2,200 days of protest the Association for the relatives of the enforced disappearances, representing 8 districts across the North East, called on UN member states to recognise the Tamil genocide and bring Sri Lanka before the International Criminal Court.

Indigo Airlines, a budget airline from India is tipped to operate direct flights between Chennai and Jaffna later this year.

In a letter to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls upon the organisation to stress to Sri Lanka the importance of civil society and to abandon proposed legislation that would severly curtail their freedom.

The University of Jaffna's Teacher's Association has described last week's violence and arrests at Vedukkunaari Athi Sivan temple in Vavuniya as the "latest manifestations of the violence of Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism" as efforts to colonise the traditionally Tamil temple continue. 

Last Friday, as Tamils gathered at the temple to observe Shivarathri, Sri Lankan police aggressively disrupted the religious ceremony and arrested eight Tamil devotees. 

Sri Lanka’s Archbishop of Colombo delivered a statement at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva last week, where he called for an investigation into the Easter Sunday attacks and – for the first time – spoke of accountability “for the atrocities in the North-East.”

Lands that were being occupied by the Sri Lankan military were released to their original owners for the first time in years, with Tamils returning to the area finding their homes having been left in ruins.

Some of the families were visiting their homes for the first time in almost 30 years. Much of the land had been seized by the Sri Lankan military after it launched an offensive to capture the Jaffna peninsula in 1995, triggering an exodus of over half a million people.

Sri Lanka's archaeology department has claimed that the eight Tamil devotees at Vedukkunaari Hill Athi Sivan temple were arrested during the Shivarathri for damaging the temple's antiquities. 

Appearing on behalf of those arrested, lawyer Kanagaratnam Sugash said that the archaeology department has falsely accused the eight individuals of damaging historical monuments at the temple.  

Hundreds of women from all eight districts across the Tamil homeland 8 districts took to the streets in Kilinochchi today, demanding an end all forms of oppression, harassment, and militarisation across the North-East, including eliminating violence against women.

The rally was organized by the North-East Women’s Collective under the theme of “Let Us Eliminate Intersectional Oppressions against Women”.

The leader of the Crusaders for Democratic Party, C. Vendan, called on India to expedite the release of the remaining freed convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case who are presently detained in special camps.

The call to release the remaining freed convicts comes following the death of Santhan who was freed from the case over a year ago but died a few days before his return to Jaffna.

The remaining freed convicts are Murugan, Robert, and Jayakumar

Tamil families of the disappeared in Vavuniya are marking 2578 days of continuous roadside protest today. in pursuit of answers to the whereabouts of their forcibly disappeared loved ones.

Many of the families witnessed their relatives being taken into Sri Lankan military custody at the end of the armed conflict in 2009 or they were abducted in white vans.