Like its neighbor to the north, Sri Lanka has a large population of death row inmates – Reuters recently put it at more than 480. But official executions in Sri Lanka are even more rare than in India: The state has not put a criminal to death since 1976.
Extrajudicial executions, however, were not uncommon during the government’s war with the Tamil Tigers that ran from 1983 to 2009.
The lack of official executions is particularly noteworthy because Sri Lanka effectively reinstated capital punishment for rape, drug trafficking, and murder in 2004, but still has yet to use it. That may change soon, however. On Tuesday, the government began interviews to fill its two vacant executioner positions.
Mark Sappenfield
Editor
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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