“Thousands of journalists have fled their home countries in recent years to escape political repression, save their lives and escape conflict – but in exile they are often vulnerable to physical, digital and legal threats,” a U.N. investigator said on May 22.

Irene Khan said in a report to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) that the number of journalists in exile has increased as the space for independent and critical media has been “shrinking in democratic countries where authoritarian trends are gaining ground.”

Today, she said, free, independent and diverse media supporting democracy and holding the powerful to account are either absent or severely constrained in over a third of the world’s nations, where more than two-thirds of the global population lives.

The U.N. independent investigator on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression said most journalists and some independent media outlets have left their countries so they can report and investigate freely “without fear or favour.”

But Ms. Khan, a Bangladeshi lawyer who previously served as secretary general of Amnesty International, said exiled journalists often find themselves in precarious positions, facing threats against them and their families from their home countries without assured legal status or adequate support to continue working in their country of refuge.

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“Fearing for their own safety or that of their families back home and struggling to survive financially and overcome the many challenges of living in a foreign country, many journalists eventually abandon their profession,” she said. “Exile thus becomes yet another way to silence critical voices – another form of press censorship.”

Ms. Khan, whose mandate comes from the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, said there are international legal protections for journalists in exile who range from full-time professional reporters to bloggers publishing on the internet and elsewhere. “The problem is “the failure of states to respect their obligations under international law,” she said.

In recent years, Ms. said, hundreds of journalists have fled from Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Ethiopia, Iran, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Russia, Sudan, Somalia, Turkey and Ukraine. In addition, smaller numbers have fled from a range of other countries including Burundi, Guatemala, India, Pakistan and Tajikistan, “to name just a few,” she said.

Ms. Khan said there is no data on human rights violations committed by countries outside their borders. “But there is anecdotal evidence including victims’ testimony, scholarly research and the experience of civil society organisations suggesting that “a high prevalence” of such “transnational repression” targets exiled journalists and media outlets,” she said.

Ms. Khan said “the butchering of exiled Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul was an outrageous, audacious act of transnational repression.” Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who entered the consulate on October 2, 2018, to get documents for his impending marriage, never emerged and his remains have never been found.

Ms. Khan also pointed to Turkey’s extraterritorial abductions and forcible return of at least 100 Turkish nationals, including journalists, from many countries, and Iran’s targeting of exiled Iranian journalists and media outlets as well as Iranian and Iranian-origin journalists and media staffers working for the BBC Persian-language service.

In February 2020, she said, prominent Iranian exiled journalist Rana Rahimpour received death threats against herself, her husband, her children and her elderly parents.

Ms. Khan said the world witnessed a blatant example of forced abduction when Belarus authorities used a false bomb threat in violation of international law to divert a commercial airliner as exiled media worker Raman Pratasevich was travelling to the country’s main airport in May 2021. He was arrested, convicted, sentenced to eight years in prison and later pardoned.

As for digital transnational repression, the U.N. special rapporteur said attempts to intimidate and silence journalists and their sources and promote self-censorship online have increased over the past decade.

Ms. Khan said common practices include “recruiting armies of trolls and bots to amplify vicious personal attacks on individual journalists to discredit them and their reporting, blocking exiled news sites or jamming broadcasts, and targeted digital surveillance.” “Online attacks including death threats, rape threats and smear campaigns have skyrocketed in the past 10 years,” she said.

“Digital surveillance also surged over the past decade as spyware enables authorities to access journalists’ phones and other devices without their knowledge,” Ms. Khan said. In early 2022, journalists from El Salvador fled to Costa Rica, Mexico and elsewhere after civil society investigations reported the use of Pegasus spyware on their devices.

She said exiled journalists often face two major legal threats from their home countries: “investigation, prosecution and punishment in absentia, and the pursuit of their extradition on trumped up criminal charges.”

Hong Kong’s recently adopted National Security Law, augmented by the Safeguarding National Security Ordnance, “criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism and ‘collusion with foreign organizations’ in sweeping terms and with extraterritorial reach,” she said. It has been used extensively against independent journalists in Hong Kong and has hampered the work of journalists in exile and forced many to self-censor.

After Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Ms. Khan said, it adopted draconian laws punishing anyone discrediting the armed forces or disseminating false information about the military operation. This has led independent media to self-censor, shut down or leave the country. “Russian courts have issued sentences in absentia against several exiled journalists,” she said.

Ms. Khan called for countries hosting exiled journalists to provide them with visas and work permits.

“Exiled journalists also need better protection from physical and online attacks, long-term support from civil society and press freedom groups, and “they need companies to ensure that the technologies that are essential to practice journalism are not disrupted or weaponized against them,” she said.

A decade-and-a-half cannot heal the deep wounds from a protracted civil war. Tens of thousands of people perished across Sri Lanka’s north and east even as it witnessed enormous destruction. Concerns of truth, accountability and justice linger, while questions of past and future political choices loom large. In this context, the emergence of a new generation should at the very least begin to change the social, economic, and political landscape of a war-torn region. However, economic reconstruction has hardly progressed, with subsequent crises setting back development further. Politics remains polarised and fraught without a political settlement. The social aspirations of the Tamil middle class remain wedded to somehow joining the diaspora, even as the working people living in the island’s north and east remain destitute with few options. How does one explain this post-war impasse? And, what is the way out for Sri Lanka’s war-torn people?

Derailed reconstruction

Trains that were not seen by generations in the north resumed a decade ago. Banks and supermarkets were built along the carpeted roads, even as plush hotels opened for tourists and the Tamil diaspora began visiting Jaffna town. Yet, beneath this seeming prosperity, just a few miles into the countryside, the travails of the masses were evident in their desperation for stable livelihoods. Just as some rural communities began overcoming these challenges, when their fields, home gardens and coconut trees began bearing fruit, Sri Lanka descended into chaos again.

The Easter terror bombings of April 2019 shook the country, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and now the economic crisis, the worst since Sri Lankan Independence. For a population that was surfacing from the dredges of war and dispossession, and turning its focus towards the education of its children and the employment of its youth, the current moment signals the loss of another generation.

Economic misery is seen nation-wide, as is outmigration with the long circling lines outside the passport office. For the deprived and the landless among the war-torn people, migration is out of question, economic opportunities are next to nil, and hunger is the new normal. Yet, there is no one to listen to them, much less to provide them support. Sinking in its crises, now compounded by International Monetary Fund-prescribed austerity measures, the state has abandoned them.

The myth of reviving the war-torn regions with the Tamil diaspora’s deep pockets stands exposed by the meagre flow of investment funds. The international donor development projects that focused on infrastructure after the war have hardly revived the local economy. In fact, individualised assistance by non-government organisations has only disempowered families and trapped them in dependence. Many families, especially women, have been pushed into predatory microfinance debt.

Tamil politics across the spectrum has been negligent about the concerns of local livelihoods, as they are beholden to their class and social interests, with one foot in the Tamil diaspora. Politicians who talk big on accountability, especially to international actors, hardly engage with ordinary people. They peddle the myth of diaspora remittances sustaining war-affected communities, when, in reality, such remittances only reach a very small segment of the urban Tamil middle class.

Polarisation and the minorities

For the economic and political trajectory in the North and East after the war, it is the Rajapaksa regime that must take much of the blame for its jingoistic war victory celebration, a continued militarisation and the vulgar projection of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. That said, it is unfortunate that Tamil nationalist politics continues to mirror its Sinhala counterpart in its self-sustenance through a polarising discourse. Little has changed in its dominant clamour for Tamil rights, as it harks back to the rhetoric of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, basks in enfeebling victimhood, and an unending faith in the international community. The regular post-war pilgrimages to the UN Human Rights Council by the political actors, social allies in civil society, and the virulent sections of the Tamil diaspora, conjure bombastic hopes in the Tamil public sphere. For them, this so-called accountability process is predicated on delivering international intervention.

In the meantime, political actors in the South and the North have hardly built social and economic bridges between the communities towards political reconciliation. Devolution of power to the regions and power-sharing at the centre have been repeatedly dumped for political expediency by those wielding power in Colombo. Indeed, that was the case with regime change in 2015, when a major opening towards a political settlement was lost in the rivalry between then President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The persisting intransigence of the national leadership, along with the takeover of lands owned by the Tamil and Muslim minorities by the state, and ongoing attacks on memorialisation of the war dead reflect a grim reality.

There was the historic opportunity with the election of the first Northern Provincial Council in 2013, but it ended its tenure with utter disgrace in 2018, where the Tamil nationalist leadership had nothing to show even in terms of political or economic vision for its constituencies. The racism and arrogance of the political elite in Colombo and the hollowness of the Tamil political leadership have been the bane of Sri Lankan politics. Within the North and the East, Tamil-Muslim relations remain strained. The Northern Muslims evicted in an act of ethnic cleansing by the LTTE in October 1990 have hardly been reintegrated into Jaffna. The Hill Country Tamils of Indian origin, or Malaiyaha Tamils, who were displaced from the plantations to the North during successive pogroms, and following their disenfranchisement, found little solidarity in the North. They became bonded labour, then the cannon fodder for the civil war, and many to this day remain landless or settled in land unsuitable for agriculture. Caste oppression in Jaffna is now reconsolidating by stealth around the temples funded by the Tamil diaspora, while some groups are attempting Hindutva-styled communal mobilisations.

Future of the Tamil people

Reflecting on the misery and dispossession of our people today, one is reminded of the powerful words of the Tamil leftist, V. Karalasingham. In his book titled, The Way Out for the Tamil speaking people, he had the following to say in 1963, just 15 years after Independence.

“We now come against a strange paradox. The Tamil speaking people have been led in the last decade by an apparently resolute leadership guided by the best intentions receiving not merely the widest support of the people but also their enthusiastic cooperation and yet the Tamil speaking people find themselves at the lowest ebb in their history. Despite all their efforts the people have suffered one defeat after another, one humiliation after another. How is one to explain the yawning gulf between the strivings of the people and the virtually hopeless impasse in which they find themselves?”

No one would have imagined six decades ago, how much worse the situation of the Tamil people could become, and to what decrepit depths Tamil politics could descend. The future of the Tamil people is dependent on rejecting bankrupt Tamil nationalism and forging a new vision for themselves and the entire country.

In the great revolt of 2022 or the ‘Aragalaya’, where Sri Lankans from different ethnic and religious backgrounds came together to chase away a President, who had claimed the status of a supreme war hero and custodian of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, there is inspiration for what our country can be.

Despite the authoritarian and economic repression today, the years ahead could take us on a different path, charted by the struggles for social and economic justice confronting the most formidable economic crisis in close to a century. The Tamil people must rethink their strategies, depart from the isolationist and suicidal politics that has reduced them to historical irrelevance, and join forces with all the peoples to determine not just their own future but also the democratic future of the country, based on equality and freedom.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and Senior Lecturer, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka

A view of the screen showing the result of a vote on a resolution regarding the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, during the 55th session of the Human Rights Council, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 5, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

India on April 5 abstained on a resolution at the Human Rights Council that called on Israel for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and called on states to implement an arms embargo, which was adopted by the 47-member Human Rights Council.

While India’s abstention is believed to be in line with previous votes on any HRC resolutions that call for “accountability”, it did vote in favour of three other resolutions that criticised Israel for human rights violations against Palestinians, Israel’s occupation of Syrian Golan, and called for the Palestinian right to self-determination. All four resolutions were introduced at the HRC in Geneva by Pakistan on behalf of the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation.

Friday’s vote was significant as it followed the killing of seven international aid workers in Gaza in Israeli airstrikes, and a military strike by Israel on the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, which India had expressed “concerns” about. While the Ministry of External Affairs did not issue any explanation for the vote, it is understood to follow previous abstentions on similar resolutions, and also in line with its vote at the UN General Assembly in October 2023, since the HRC resolution (A/HRC/55/L.30) failed to condemn Hamas, while condemning Israel’s killing of more than 33,000 Palestinians, blockade of food and humanitarian aid into the area, and “forcible transfer” of civilians from one part of Gaza to another in the past six months. 

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The United States, Germany and four other countries voted against the resolution, titled “Human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the obligation to ensure accountability and justice” and India joined France and Japan amongst 13 countries that abstained. However, a significant majority, 28 members of the HRC including Bangladesh, China, Maldives, the UAE, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa voted in favour of the resolution. 

The Israeli Ambassador, who criticised the resolution for its failure to mention Hamas and condemn the October 7 attacks in which 1,200 Israelis were killed, walked out of the plenary session in protest at the end of her speech.

The resolution that was finally adopted demanded that Israel “immediately lift its illegal blockade on the Gaza Strip and all other forms of collective punishment and siege”, called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, condemned Israeli actions that “may amount to ethnic cleansing”, and spoke of the “starvation of civilians” by the Israeli forces. It also pressed for punitive measures, calling on all states to “cease the sale, transfer and diversion of arms, munitions and other military equipment to Israel” and to refrain from the transfer of “surveillance goods and technologies” used to violate or abuse human rights.

India voted in favour of three other resolutions that were also adopted with large majorities on “Right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”, “Human rights in the occupied Syrian” Golan, and “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan”.

Under threat: Shrine of Bab, the spiritual centre of Bahais, in the Israeli port city of Haifa. File
| Photo Credit: AFP

A flattened patch of earth is all that remains of where the graves once stood — evidence, Iran’s Bahais say, that their community is subjected to persecution even in death.

Beneath the ground in the Khavaran cemetery in the southeastern outskirts of Tehran lie the remains of at least 30 and potentially up to 45 recently-deceased Bahais, according to the Bahai International Community (BIC).

“But their resting places are no longer marked by headstones, plaques and flowers, as they once were, because this month Iranian authorities destroyed them and then levelled the site with a bulldozer,” said the BIC.

The desecration of the graves represents a new attack against Iran’s biggest non-Muslim religious minority which has, according to its representatives, been subjected to systematic persecution and discrimination since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979.

The alleged destruction has been condemned by the United States, which has also criticised the ongoing persecution of the Bahais, as have United Nations officials.

“Unlike other minorities, Bahais do not have their faith recognised by Iran’s constitution and have no reserved seats in Parliament. They are unable to access the country’s higher education and they suffer harassment ranging from raids against their businesses to confiscation of assets and arrest. “Even death does not bring an end to the persecution,” the BIC says.

According to the community, following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the authorities confiscated two Bahai-owned burial sites and now forcibly bury their dead in Khavaran.

The cemetery is the site of a mass grave where political prisoners executed in 1988 are buried. “They want to put pressure on the Bahai community in every way possible,” Simin Fahandej, the BIC representative to the United Nations, told AFP.

“These people have faced persecution all their lives, were deprived of the right to go to university, and now their graves are levelled.”

The U.S. State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom said it condemned the “destruction” of the graves at the cemetery, adding that Bahais “in Iran continue to face violations of funeral and burial rights”.

“Motivated by religious persecution, not by perceived threat to national security”

The razing of the graves comes at a time of intensified repression of the Bahai community in Iran, which representatives believe is still hundreds of thousands strong.

Senior community figures Mahvash Sabet, a 71-year-old poet, and Fariba Kamalabadi, 61, were both arrested in July 2022 and are serving 10-year jail sentences. Both were previously jailed by the authorities in the last two decades.

“We have also seen the regime dramatically increase Bahai property seizures and use sham trials to subject Bahais to extended prison sentences,” said the U.S. State Department.

“At least 70 Bahais are currently in detention or are serving prison sentences, while an additional 1,200 are facing court proceedings or have been sentenced to prison sentences,” according to the United Nations.

The Bahai faith is a relatively young monotheistic religion with spiritual roots dating back to the early 19th century in Iran. Members have repeatedly faced charges of being agents of Iran’s arch-foe Israel, which activists say are without any foundation.

The Bahais have a spiritual centre in the Israeli port city of Haifa, but its history dates back to well before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

“The fact that they are going after the dead shows that they are motivated by religious persecution and not by a perceived threat to national security or society,” said Ms. Fahandej.

Repression of the Bahais, 200 of whom were executed in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, has varied in strength over the last four-and-a-half decades but has been in one of its most intense phases in recent years, community members and observers say.

The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week he was “extremely distressed and shocked at the persistent persecution, arbitrary arrests and harassment of members of the Bahai community”.

Ms. Fahandej said it was not clear what had prompted the current crackdown but noted it came as the authorities seek to stamp out dissent of all kinds in the wake of the nationwide protests that erupted in September 2022.

“The treatment of the Bahais is very much connected with the overall situation of human rights in the country,” she said.

Jagpreet Kaur. File
| Photo Credit: Photo Credit: X/@JagKaur_IFS

India has slammed Pakistan as it raised the issue of Jammu and Kashmir at the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, saying it should introspect on its own appalling human rights record and “deserved global reputation” as the “world’s terrorism factory”.

Under Secretary in India’s Permanent Mission to the UN in Geneva Jagpreet Kaur exercised the country’s Right of Reply at the General debate at the 55th Regular Session of the UN Human Rights Council on Monday after Pakistan, speaking on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), raked the issue of Jammu and Kashmir in its statement.

“We have taken the floor previously during this Session and conveyed our disinclination to waste the Council’s time in responding to fallacious comments about India, by one particular delegation, which does so as they do not have anything constructive to contribute,” Ms. Kaur said on March 4.

Without naming Pakistan, Ms. Kaur said it is unfortunate that “this country continues with its diatribe against India, including by continuing to misuse the OIC’s platform to further their own politically motivated agenda.

“We do not wish to dignify such remarks by responding to them and are taking the floor again only to urge that delegation to introspect on their own appalling human rights record and their deserved global reputation as the world’s terrorism factory,” Ms. Kaur said.

Last week, in a strong retort to Pakistan, India had said in the Council that the country is soaked in the red of the bloodshed from the terrorism that it sponsors around the world as First Secretary in the Permanent Mission of India to the UN in Geneva Anupama Singh had exercised India’s Right of Reply at the high-level segment of the 55th regular session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Coming down heavily on Pakistan, India said that “we cannot pay any further attention to a country that speaks while being soaked in red — the red of the bloodshed from the terrorism it sponsors around the world; the red of its debt-riddled national balance sheets; and the red of the shame its own people feel for their government having failed to serve their actual interests.”

She said a country that hosts and even celebrates UN Security Council-sanctioned terrorists, “commenting on India whose pluralistic ethos and democratic credentials are exemplars for the world, is a contrast for everyone to see.” Hitting out at Pakistan for the “extensive references” to India, Mr. Singh had said it is deeply unfortunate for the Council’s platform to have once again been misused to make patently false allegations against India.