Sri Lanka: What's Next with Ambika Satkunananthan
On July 9th, thousands of protesters stormed the Presidential Secretariat and the official residences of the President and Prime Minister, demanding that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, resign their posts. Rajapaksa, who fled to Singapore, has since appointed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as Acting President and officially resigned from his position as President. Meanwhile, ordinary Sri Lankan citizens continue to face the country's worst economic crisis in post-independence history. As of July 7th, sixteen people have died while waiting in line for fuel. To help us complicate the mainstream narratives around the protests and protesters, and to discuss where Sri Lanka is, and should be headed, we are joined by our guest, Ambika Satkunananthan.
Ways to help people survive Sri Lanka's crisis: Please visit this Google doc to donate to various organizations providing cooked food and dry rations to the most vulnerable communities, and this article by open-source research collective, Watchdog, that details how to donate directly to the Ministry of Health and to hospitals. Despite the government's attempt to censor them, Sri Lankan health workers are declaring a dire shortage of medicines and medical supplies, with paediatric doctors resorting to re-using neo-natal endotracheal tubes to help premature babies breathe.
Ambika Satkunananthan is currently a Fellow of the Open Society Foundations. For more than twenty years she has worked with community organizations and communities impacted by human rights violations, in particular, assisting them access remedies. From Oct 2015 to March 2020, she was a Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, where she led the first ever national study of prisons. She continues to work on the rights of imprisoned persons and re-imagining the carceral approach of the criminal justice system. Her current work includes research, advocacy and interventions on drug control, detention and rehabilitation in Sri Lanka, as part of which her research on the issue, the first such study, was published by Harm Reduction International in August 2021. She is a member of the Expert Panel of the Trial Watch Project of the Clooney Foundation and a member of the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. She is an affiliate of the Eleos Justice Centre, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. She has a B.A. and LL.B from Monash University and a LL.M from University of Nottingham where she was a Chevening Fellow.
This show is hosted and produced by SWANA collective member Soraya Zarook, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can also follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!
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