SL Attorney General delays response to Tamil political prisoners

[TamilNet, Thursday, 03 March 2011, 23:45 GMT]
The Sri Lankan Attorney General’s Department has been inordinately delaying to process the requests made by Tamil political detainees being held in prisons in the South to transfer them to prisons in Jaffna as they fear attacks on them following the recent ethnic attacks in Anuradhapura.

The political prisoners, detained for long periods of time without being released for want of evidence or not being indicted in courts, have expressed their dismay at the discriminative attitude of the Sri Lankan Attorney General’s Department towards them.

Sri Lankan A.G’s department continues to hold the view that since the witnesses in these cases are in the south the cases have to be filed in the courts in the south.

Legal experts helping the Tamil detainees said that even in the cases that were filed in the Jaffna High Courts, the accused were freed as it has been proved in the ‘voire dire’ examinations that the ‘confessions’ relied upon by the prosecution to prove the guilt has been held as inadmissible as they were obtained under duress through torture.

Even after being freed by the courts, the Police was keeping some victims in the Prisons without releasing them even after six months of the verdict of the Courts, the legal sources further said.