Reply To:
Name - Reply Comment
Last Updated : 2024-05-06 14:52:00
22 January 2013 09:53 pm - 2 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Rizana Nafeek’s tragedy is that she was a Muslim and a poor Sri Lankan. As a result, she gets little sympathy from either her fellow Muslims or from non-Muslim fellow countrymen..jpg)
But it’s practice, not theory, that matters. It’s pointless having the most modern legal system in the world if trials are unfair. In Rizana Nafeek’s case, the issue isn’t whether Sharia law is just, or acceptable in a modern, democratic sense, but whether she received a fair trial and competent legal representation in Saudi Arabia. Kumbhakarna firmly holds the view that she did not. If she did, the chances are she’d be alive today, and the blame for this tragic failure lies with our pious government as much as it does with the Saudis.
Kumbhakarna doesn’t blame the government alone. True, it has funds to provide its faithful with an obscene number of luxury vehicles and other facilities while our embassies abroad are chronically short of everything. It can re-write the laws when it needs to defend its own. This is criminal negligence. It failed to get Rizana a proper translator both during police investigations and at the trial. Legal representation for her was incompetent. But, while we can blame the government for all that, what was Sri Lankan society doing during the seven long years when the accused languished in jail? To say that Muslims should have done fund raising is to put the whole thing on a sectarian footing. The truth is that all Sri Lankans should have done that, as well as putting public pressure on the government, because the girl was a Sri Lankan first. But this simply didn’t happen.
Rizana could be described in a number of ways – underprivileged, poor from birth, ‘backward,’ unsophisticated, rural – whatever the correct description is, we can safely assume that she was deeply religious as the majority of our villagers are, whatever their religion. She would have feared, indeed even accepted, punishment from her God if she was guilty. But her continued hope in eventual freedom amply reveals her innocence.richardsonri Friday, 25 January 2013 06:27 PM
Today is puppet's birth day.
There must have been a lot of be headings to mark the occasion
richardsonri Friday, 25 January 2013 06:31 PM
Must shove a pork sausage up the Minister's a$$ before beheading him.
Add comment
Comments will be edited (grammar, spelling and slang) and authorized at the discretion of Daily Mirror online. The website also has the right not to publish selected comments.
Reply To:
Name - Reply Comment
US authorities are currently reviewing the manifest of every cargo aboard MV
On March 26, a couple arriving from Thailand was arrested with 88 live animal
According to villagers from Naula-Moragolla out of 105 families 80 can afford
Is the situation in Sri Lanka so grim that locals harbour hope that they coul
05 May 2024 - 4 - 1399
