U.S. calls for Sri Lanka to investigate attacks on press

The United States Tuesday said it remains extremely concerned about threats to freedom of expression in Sri Lanka and urged the Sri Lankan authorities to conduct thorough investigations into all attacks and killings of journalists and to bring the perpetrators to justice.
"The United States calls on Sri Lankan authorities to demonstrate their commitment to the rule of law and freedom of expression by conducting thorough investigations into all attacks and killings of journalists and bringing perpetrators to justice," the U.S. State Department spokesperson Patrick Ventrell told the media at the press briefing Tuesday. "The necessity of upholding this fundamental right was not only a component of the UN Human Rights Council resolution in Geneva this March, but it was a central recommendation of the Sri Lankan Government's own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission," the spokesperson pointed out. Continuing the Free the Press campaign, the spokesperson highlighted the repeated attacks on Sri Lanka's Tamil daily Uthayan which sustained severe damage to its printing machines in a recent arson attack in addition to that attacks on the newspaper's personnel last month. The assault on a free press in Sri Lanka extends beyond Uthayan, the spokesperson said pointing out that the BBC Tamil-language service has had its programs about Sri Lanka and the Human Rights Council censored. "Reporters have been physically assaulted and murdered in years past, and a prominent political cartoonist has been missing for three years," he noted. The spokesperson mentioned that the U.S. has seen the Amnesty International report released Tuesday and noted that it echoes many of the concerns raised in the State Department's own Human Rights Report released last month. Ventrell reiterated that the U.S. remains extremely concerned about threats to freedom of expression in Sri Lanka and continue to support the need for justice and accountability for serious human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. "We urge Sri Lankan authorities to protect freedom of expression," he said. "The necessity of upholding this fundamental right was not only a component of the UN Human Rights Council resolution in Geneva this March, but it was a central recommendation of the Sri Lankan Government's own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission," the spokesperson noted. Responding to media queries, the spokesperson replied that the U.S. will continue to work with the Sri Lanka bilaterally on the issue. "We're going to continue to work with interested parties that include a number of people quite frankly in the international community who are deeply concerned. And so we'll continue to do so bilaterally, but we'll also continue to do so with other members of the international community and that's certainly been the case with the - at the UN Human Rights Council and in other fora. So we'll continue to press our concerns very directly," he said.