Securing the freedom of expression in the new Sri Lanka: essential institutional reforms

<p>Chapter 11 of the common opposition candidate’s presidential election manifesto is devoted to media freedom. Among other things, it includes simple commitments such as lifting the bans on news websites run from abroad. Such infantile measures were typical of the tin-pot – and ultimately self-defeating – despotism that emanated from the erstwhile Ministry of Defence. The emphasis on media freedom in a separate chapter of the manifesto was quite rightly placed, in view of the stupendous suppression to which the free media and independent journalists had been subjected under the Rajapaksa regime, and the disgusting depths to which the state media had sunk in service of it.
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