Sri Lanka's highest court ordered police yesterday to stop expelling Tamils from the capital, a lawyer said, after a rights group warned the recent removal of hundreds of Tamils could further fuel a 24-year separatist ethnic conflict.
The Defense Ministry said 376 people were rounded up in Colombo and sent to Sri Lanka's north and east -- areas that have been beset by bloodshed for most of the past year -- as a security precaution amid the rising violence that has claimed more than 5,000 lives in 19 months.
Rights groups, opposition lawmakers and the US roundly condemned the expulsions, calling them "blatantly discriminatory," divisive and likely to increase tension in the war-torn nation.
The Supreme Court, responding to a petition appealing for the expelled Tamils' fundamental rights, moved to quell the furor yesterday.
"The Supreme Court issued an order stopping police from carrying out any further evacuations of Tamils from Colombo," said M.A. Sumanthiran, a lawyer for the Center for Policy Alternatives, an independent think tank, which filed the petition.
The court also said those evicted must not be prevented from returning to the capital, Sumanthiran said.
The petition claims the police violated the Tamils' fundamental rights and freedom of movement, and says they were unlawfully arrested, Sumanthiran said. The next hearing on the petition will be on June 22.
On Thursday, senior police officer Rohan Abeywardena said the Tamils were expelled because they "were staying in Colombo without a valid reason." Others felt the action was dangerous.
"Nothing could be more inflammatory in Sri Lanka's polarized climate than identifying people by ethnicity and kicking them out of the capital," Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement yesterday.
"The government has every right to take action against individuals who are reasonably suspected of committing a crime and to take security measures when there are threats to the public," Adams said. "But that doesn't mean it can arbitrarily discriminate against a whole group of people."
The US embassy issued a statement calling for the evictions to stop and urging the Sri Lankan government to make public the destinations of those removed and ensure their safety and well-being.
"Such measures violate the Sri Lankan Constitution's guarantee that every citizen has the right to freedom of movement and choice of residence within Sri Lanka," the embassy statement said.
Also yesterday, hundreds of protesters rallied in Colombo against the evictions, calling for the protection of Tamil rights.
Sirithunga Jayasuriya, chairman of the Civil Monitoring Committee, a human rights group, condemned the move as "ethnic cleansing," and opposition lawmakers said the government had violated the Tamils' fundamental rights.
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