SL High Court in Vavuniyaa tricked again into postponing hearings on TPP case

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 July 2018, 19:35 GMT]
The Attorney General Department of the unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka has once again managed to get the SL High Court in Vavuniyaa to postpone the long-awaited hearing on a case involving three Tamil political prisoners (TPP) by two months. After re-transferring case back to Vavuniyaa from the so-called Special Court in Anuradhapura, a previous hearing at the Vavuniyaa was also postponed at the request of the SL Attorney General's Department, which was arguing that it needed time to locate a witness, who was supposed to appear for the hearing in Vavuniyaa. In the meantime, Vavuniyaa High Court Judge Sasi Mahendran, well versed in the particular case, has been transferred away from the High Court in Vavuniyaa. Judge Mahendran has been critical of the role played by the AG Department.

Now, the AG Department has chosen to request the new High Court Judge in Vavuniyaa, N.M.M. Abdulla, to postpone the hearing by two months.

The latest reason given by the AG was that the date in August, fixed earlier for the next hearing, is not suitable for Madhawa Tennakoon, the Senior State Counsel at the AG Department.

Tennakoon skillfully manages the dilly-dallying of the case, Tamil legal sources in Vavuniyaa said.

Furthermore, the request of the AG Department was taken up for review in the absence of Anton Punithanayagam, the lawyer representing the three TPPs at Vavuniyaa High Court, on Thursday.

Mathiyarasan Sulaxan (Kara’navaay North in Vadamaraadchi, Jaffna), Rasathurai Thiruvarul (6th Division, Vela’nai West, Jaffna) and Ganeshan Tharshan (Naavalap-piddi, Kandy) have repeatedly been protesting against their cases being transferred away from Vavuniyaa High Court to Anuradhapura or any other court in the South.

The three Tamil political prisoners have been languishing in detention five years and six months.

Earlier, their cases were transferred from the Vavuniyaa High Court to a so-called Special Court, which was set up during the times of Rajapaksa regime.

In August 2017, they waged a 38-day long fast-unto-death protest in August 2017 demanding their cases to be transferred back to the Vavuniyaa High Court.

The SL regime, which was under increased pressure as their protest received broad support from the people in the North-East, applied the tactic of containment by finally agreeing to transfer the cases back to Vavuniyaa.

Then, the SL Attorney General Department started to drag its feet citing delays in locating a witness.

While the TPPs were opposing Sinhala judges hearing their cases in a predominant Sinhala area, the AG Department resorted to the argument that a Tamil witness was afraid to appear at the High Court in Vavuniyaa.

The genocidal apparatus in Colombo manages the SL justice system through manipulations, seeking postponements, transferring the cases and the judges critical to its manipulations, the families of the three Tamil prisoners told TamilNet on Saturday.

“We understand the ethnic bias of the SL justice system, which is opposed to Eezham Tamils. However, we are unable to grasp the failure of the international human rights system, which repeatedly facilitates escape routes for the genoncidal state of Sri Lanka,” said one of the TPP's family members, who did not wish to be named due to security reasons.

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