The International
Federation of Journalists (IFJ) is concerned by reports that access to
independent news portals Groundviewsand
Vikalpawas temporarily blocked on
Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) ADSL on June
20.
The two news portals are among the
few openly critical media outlets in the country. The award-winning citizen
journalism portal Groundviews, published
in English,and the Sinhala-language partnersite Vikalpa are hosted by non-government
organisation the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo.
The Sri Lankan
website of corruption watchdog Transparency International was also temporarily
blocked on SLT ADSL. All three websites are now accessible in Sri Lanka,
though it remains unclear whether the outage was the result of a government
directive as is widely believed, or a technical fault.
“In a media landscape riddled with
fear and self-censorship, the IFJ hopes the temporary blockage of important
sites that support uncompromising voices was an aberration, and not an
indication of things to come,” IFJ Asia-Pacific
said.
Other critical news media have been
blocked by the Government previously, with Tamilnet, Lanka
News Web and Sri Lanka Guardian all permanently
blocked.
Online news portal Lanka-e-News has been temporarily blocked several
times, most recently on April
28, when a Magistrate’s Court ordered Sri Lanka’s
Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) to suspend the organisation’s
online services.
The ban came after journalist
Shantha Wijesooriya was charged with contempt of court. It was lifted on May 12
when the charges were dropped, after Lanka-e-News
published a retraction and two apologies for the report in question.
Groundviews moved to quickly
establish a mirror site at http://gvsrilanka.wordpress.com/ during the outage, and has instructions for circumventing any future blockages
on its website.
For further
information contact IFJ Asia-Pacific
on +61 2 9333 0919
The IFJ
represents more than 600,000 journalists in 131 countries
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IFJ on Twitter: @ifjasiapacific
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