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after the crime. 248 Because of fear of reprisals, only one witness—Dr. K. Manoharan,
the father of one of the victims—has offered to testify as a prosecution witness. No
one else among the many persons in the vicinity of the killings has agreed.
After testifying at a magistrate’s inquest in January, Dr. Manoharan and his family
were subjected to repeated threats, forcing them eventually to leave Trincomalee. On
the evening of the inquest, unidentified men banged on Dr. Manoharan’s door and
threw stones at his house. Dr. Manoharan subsequently received anonymous phone
calls threatening to kill him and his family. In June the police threatened one of Dr.
Manoharan’s sons as he went to school, and at a checkpoint a policeman delayed Dr.
Manoharan, saying, “You are supporting the LTTE and our high officers are
supporting you, so how can we do our duty?” Naval officers and police also came to
Dr. Manoharan’s home in the evening offering “protection” in a manner suggesting
not a genuine offer of assistance, but a thinly veiled threat. 249
Potential witnesses were also scared by the January 24, 2006 killing of the journalist
Subramaniyam Sugirdharajan, apparently because he had taken photographs of the
five murdered youth, which contested claims that the men were killed by a grenade.
(See Chapter VIII, “Freedom of Expression and Association.”)
Non-implementation of the 17 th Amendment
In October 2001 the Sri Lankan parliament unanimously voted in favor of the 17th
amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution, which created a Constitutional Council. 250
The council’s task is to nominate members of the Human Rights Commission, the
Election Commission, Public Service Commission, the Permanent Commission to
Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption, the Finance Commission, the
Delimitation Commission, and the newly formed National Police Commission. 251 The
248 “Flight, Displacement and the Two-fold Reign of Terror,” University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), Information
Bulletin No. 40, June 15, 2006, http://www.uthr.org/bulletins/bul40.htm (accessed July 25, 2007).
249 “Sri Lanka: Protect Witnesses in Trincomalee Killings,” Human Rights Watch news release, June 28, 2006,
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/06/27/slanka13628.htm.
250 See the full text of the 17th amendment at http://www.priu.gov.lk/Cons/1978Constitution/SeventeenthAmendment.html
(accessed May 30, 2007).
251 Under the amendment, the membership of the Judicial Services Commission is composed of the chief justice and two
sitting judges recommended by the president and approved by the Constitutional Council.
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Human Rights Watch August 2007