VANCOUVER — The first hearings of refugee claims are to start Monday in Vancouver by some of the approximately 490 Tamil asylum seekers who arrived in Victoria on Friday.
Officials will decide on a person-by-person basis whether to keep migrants in jail or release them.
The Canadian Tamil Congress said Sunday it has assembled a team of [...]

From the Komagata Maru carrying 376 Punjabi passengers and the SS St. Louis travelling with 900 Jewish asylum seekers, to the boats with 600 people from China’s Fujian province and the Ocean Lady that docked in B.C. last year with Tamil refugees – there is something about boatloads of migrants that triggers a national hysteria. [...]

The government has gradually been resettling around 300,000 ethnic minority Tamil people, most displaced in the final phase of the army offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended with the Tiger’s defeat in May after a 25-year war.
Various foreign aid and human rights groups, as well as U.N. officials, have criticized [...]

London, England (CNN) — China will execute a British man convicted of smuggling heroin within the next day, his family said Monday.
Akmal Shaikh, 53, has been informed by the Chinese authorities that he will be executed, said Seema Khan and Latif Shaikh, first cousins of the condemned man.
Khan and Shaikh told CNN Shaikh’s mother had [...]

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka’s president has given legal experts four more months to study a US State Department report cataloging alleged war crimes on the island, the presidency said in a statement Monday.
President Mahinda Rajapakse extended the December 31 deadline of the panel he appointed in November to formulate a response to the US report, [...]

By Bob Dietz/Asia Program Coordinator (CPJ)

Today marks the 100th day of J.S. Tissainayagam’s 20-year prison term. Tissainayagam, known as Tissa, was convicted of “terrorism” charges for articles documenting human rights abuses by the Sri Lankan military, as well as the difficult conditions faced by Sri Lankans displaced in the nation’s long war. His sentence was [...]

By ANDREA HOUSTON , EXAMINER STAFF WRITER
As the frigid wind whipped through Confederation Square last night, the small group of activists crowded around a candle and joined in as a local family sang a South African freedom song to mark International Human Rights Day.
The song, calledThula Sizwe, is a prayer sung during South Africa’s apartheid, [...]

Toronto, Canada
The Sri Lankan Government has been in the midst of many human rights problems ever since independence in 1948. More so than ever the country has now become an international concern in which one of the reasons for shutting up journalists who dare to speak against the ruling Government. Sri Lanka which is known [...]

By: THE CANADIAN PRESS
VANCOUVER, B.C. – Members of a Toronto-based human rights group say 76 Sri Lankans detained after they arrived off the B.C. coast in a rusty freighter are entitled by law to timely refugee hearings.
Todd Ross of Canadian Human Rights Voice says members of the group have come to Vancouver because they’re concerned [...]

The federal immigration minister is taking a tough stance on the Sri Lankan migrants found aboard a cargo ship off British Columbia last Friday.
Jason Kenney says he wants all 76 men held until authorities find out whether they have connections to terrorist or criminal organizations.
The men are being kept in detention at a Vancouver-area corrections [...]