By Erik Jensen

Erik Jensen is The Asia Foundation’s Senior Legal Advisor, a lecturer at the Stanford Law School and co-director of the law school’s Rule of Law Program. He is also an advisor to Stanford’s Afghanistan Legal Education Project.

From 1985 to 1989 I was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and a law consultant to The Asia Foundation’s office in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  During that time, I also taught in Sri Lanka’s law schools. Last December, I was back in Sri Lanka and learned that a book I wrote during my days there, An Introduction to International Law from a Sri Lankan Perspective (Open University Press: 1989), was still the standard text.  I suppose that I should have been flattered, but I was disappointed and saddened that they weren’t using a newer, updated text.  There have been no updates to the book in nearly twenty years, two decades in which incredible developments in international law have taken place.

The Asia Foundation is deeply concerned about the quality of legal education across the developing world. 
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By Nilan Fernando

Nilan Fernando is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Sri Lanka. He can be reached at nfernando@asiafound.org.

Amidst the escalating war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the north, voters in the multi-ethnic Eastern Province will vote on May 10 for a provincial council for the first time since 1988. In 1987, the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord merged the Eastern Province with the Northern Province; a referendum was to make the merger permanent but was never held. In 2006, the Supreme Court voided the merger and the two provinces were subsequently de-merged. According to the 2001 census, the ethnic composition of the Eastern Province is 45% Tamil, 32% Muslim, and 23% Sinhalese. The potential for conflict between the communities looms large if post-election power-sharing arrangements are mismanaged.
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By Thomas Parks

Thomas Parks is The Asia Foundation’s Regional Director for Conflict and Governance.

Violent conflict presents enormous challenges for development and security in Asia. Many of Asia’s worst cases of instability and political violence are a direct result of sub-national conflicts involving areas in remote or border regions. In these peripheral areas, the state tends to have very limited capacity and its authority is challenged by armed non-state actors. Conflict-affected peripheral regions are usually home to disaffected minorities or marginalized populations that hold significant grievances with the central government and political establishment. These center-periphery conflicts raise an important set of questions that largely fall outside current policy discourse on fragile states.
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By Nilan Fernando

Nilan Fernando is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan government’s decision to abrogate the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) with the LTTE on January 2 is the final act in the long, slow unraveling of Sri Lanka’s peace process. The CFA has only existed on paper for the past two years; both the government and the LTTE abrogated it long ago through their actions. Now the CFA is no more in word as well as in deed. While it marks with some finality the end of one campaign — the formal search for peace between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE – it marks the beginning of another: the campaign for the next parliamentary election, now two years away, based on new political and social divisions. It draws a sharp battle line between two opposing camps. On the one hand are nationalist forces led by the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) – that are unequivocally committed to the destruction of the LTTE. On the other hand is an opposition led by the United National Party (UNP) that vacillates between wanting to appear just as tough on terrorism in order to appeal to Sinhalese voters, but not so tough that it alienates minority voters – an important element of its vote bank — and the international community which it has tried to use as a counterweight to a popular president.
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By Thomas Parks, Amy Weinbaum and Birger Stamperdahl

Thomas Parks is The Asia Foundation’s Assistant Director for Governance, Law, and Civil Society; Amy Weinbaum is a Junior Associate for The Asia Foundation; and Birger Stamperdahl is Give2Asia’s Director of Marketing.

The devastation of the 2004 tsunami came on the heels of two separate, decades-long conflicts between insurgent armies and the governments in Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia. These conflicts had led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but they progressed very differently after the disaster: Aceh moved toward peace, while Sri Lanka was engulfed by increasing violence. Of course, the roots of these conflicts existed before December 2004, and it can be argued that the tsunami accelerated changes already in progress.
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By Nilan Fernando and Ramani Jayasundere

Nilan Fernando is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Sri Lanka; Ramani Jayasundre is the Program Manager, Access to Justice for the Foundation in Sri Lanka.

In April 2005, the Law Commission of Sri Lanka began work on the first-ever law in Sri Lanka to guarantee the rights of witnesses and victims of crime. The law’s enactment has been “a long-felt need in Sri Lanka,” which, according to Dr. Lakshman Marasinghe, Chairman of the Law Commission, will “greatly enhance the country’s quality of criminal justice.”

At the request of the Law Commission, the governmental body under the Ministry of Justice responsible for reviewing and reforming the law, The Asia Foundation provided research support, expert advice, public consultations, and advocacy for the draft Bill for the Protection of Victims of Crime and Witnesses. The Commission’s public consultations began in April 2005 and involved members of the bar and judiciary, the police, the medical association, and other civil society organizations who collectively discussed the legislation’s value and content over the course of two years. Earlier this month, the Bill received Cabinet approval and it is soon expected to be passed into law by Parliament.
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Last week, a new mobile library initiative was launched to help an estimated 80,000 families and children who do not have access to existing library services in four Local Authorities in Sri Lanka. Many of these communities were devastated by the tsunami, and schools and libraries are still in the process of being rebuilt. The mobile library initiative is being organized by The Asia Foundation with support from the AIG Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), and Give2Asia, an organization founded by The Asia Foundation to promote philanthropy to Asia.
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By Anton Nallathamby and Shamindrini Asirwatham

Mr. Anton Nallathamby is the Director of The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia program in Sri Lanka; Ms. Shamindrini Asirwatham is a Program Officer for Books for Asia in Sri Lanka.

Nearly three years have passed since a Tsunami devastated Sri Lanka’s eastern, southern, and northern coasts. In addition to supporting other recovery activities, The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia program has helped to rebuild destroyed school and public libraries by providing 100,000 new, high-quality textbooks and children’s books.  
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By V. Bruce J. Tolentino

Dr. Bruce Tolentino is the Director for Economic Reform and Development Programs at The Asia Foundation.

Economic policy reform is inherently political. Economic policies are codified into public laws, regulations, ordinances and other legal instruments that establish the “rules of the game” and allocate access and assets among various members of the body politic. Changes in economic policy affect the status or welfare of communities in varying ways, often evoking resistance from those whose welfare or status may be diminished by the reforms.

Economic policy reforms are often initiated as research activities, where technocrats – many of whom are trained economists, gather data, analyze the costs and benefits of current policies, and produce recommendations for policy reforms. However, in most of developing Asia, while economists perform policy analyses, policy makers are often politicians or civil servants – rare among who are trained in economics – and subject to the competing claims of policy stakeholders as well as the disciplines of public service. These powerful forces explain the large and persistent gaps found between the recommendations of professional economists and the policies actually enacted by policymakers.
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Last week, The Asia Foundation launched The United States’ Role in Sri Lanka’s Peace Process, a study that analyzes the United States’ involvement in Sri Lanka’s peace process from 2002-2006. The report, released amidst renewed fighting in Sri Lanka’s civil conflict, was written by Jeffrey Lunstead, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka from August 2003 to July 2006.
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