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MARWAAN MACAN-MARKAR, Asia regional correspondent
COLOMBO Predominantly Buddhist Sri Lanka’s ultranationalist government is forcing families of the country’s Muslim and Christian minorities to abandon their faith-based burial rites for relatives who die of COVID-19 consequently inviting fresh international scrutiny of the nation’s already troubled human rights record.
As the country’s death toll from the pandemic inches toward 200, the government of the hawkish President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is sticking to a policy backed by hard-line allies from the majority Sinhala-Buddhists, the political constituency that helped Rajapaksa secure two thumping electoral mandates over the past year. The official policy is for COVID-19 victims to be swiftly cremated. It has sent religious minorities already grieving for lost kin into deeper anguish.
Safeguarding Human Rights
Muneeb Rashid Malik
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. […] Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.” – Eleanor Roosevelt.
Human Rights Day is observed on 10th December every year. It is the day when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. TheUniversal Declaration of Human Rights is a document that proclaims the rights which everyone is entitled to as a human being. This year’s theme for Human Rights Day was related to the COVID-19 pandemic and it focused on the need to build back better by ensuring human rights are central to recovery efforts. In India, the statute which deals with the protection and promotion of huma