Impunity Spotlight: Sri Lanka
Lasantha Wickramatunga, The Sunday Leader
January 8, 2009, in an area outside Colombo, Sri Lanka
Eight helmeted men on four motorcycles forced Wickramatunga’s car to the side of a busy street outside Colombo and beat him with iron bars and wooden poles. He died in a local hospital a few hours later.
Wickramatunga, editor-in-chief of the weekly The Sunday Leader, was a prominent senior Sri Lankan journalist known for his critical reporting on the government. According to his brother, Lal Wickramatunga, chairman of the paper’s parent company, Leader Publications, the editor had received anonymous death threats for months.
Read more about Lasantha Wickramatunga.
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Sri Lanka is #6 on CPJ’s 2015 Impunity Index, which calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population. This month CPJ is highlighting cases from each of the 14 countries on the list ahead of the International Day to End Impunity on November 2.
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka moved to sixth place from fourth on this year’s Index, its improvement due not to prosecutions-the island nation still maintains a perfect record of impunity in journalist slayings-but to the fact that no journalists have been murdered for their work since the end of civil war in 2009. So far, President Maithripala Sirisena, inaugurated in January this year, has demonstrated greater political will for justice than his predecessor, Mahinda Rajapaksa, under whose leadership nine media murders, including the five from this index period, took place. In May, Sirisena pledged to reopen the investigations into journalists killed or disappeared during the last 30 years, naming the assassination of prominent editor Lasantha Wickramatunga and the disappearance of cartoonist Prageeth Eknelygoda as priority cases. Since then, at least seven army officers have beenarrested in connection with Eknelygoda’s case. Wickramatunga’s and all other killings remain unsolved.
IMPUNITY INDEX RATING: 0.242 unsolved journalist murders per million inhabitants
LAST YEAR: Ranked 4th with a rating of 0.443