COI Report March 2012 - UK Border Agency - Home Office

7 MARCH 2012 SRI LANKA
Country of Origin Information Service
UK Border Agency
2 February 2012
Dear colleague,
Sri Lanka: Police Registration Update
The British High Commission routinely monitors the treatment of the general population of Sri
Lanka and changes to legislation and procedures by the Sri Lankan government. This
supersedes and updates previous letters issued by this High Commission on the same subject.
Throughout the civil conflict, the Sri Lankan authorities, acting under Section 23 of the
Emergency Regulations Act, required households to register all residents, the emphasis being
on Tamils who took temporary lodgings. These lists were then used in cordon and search
operations to identify people from whom the police required further explanation as to why they
were residing or travelling in a location. Persons identified as having not registered, were
normally detained by the police for further questioning.
There was often no uniformity in the implementation of the police registration. After the new
government came to power in November 2005, police visited properties and issued forms to be
completed by the head of the household, asking them to take full responsibility for the
information provided and the persons on the list. The form sought information as to the
purchase date and price of the property, from whom the property had been purchased, how the
purchase had been financed and who had assisted in the finance etc. This form was issued to
almost all houses in the Tamil concentrations in Colombo and suburbs. Generally the police did
not say that they were targeting only Tamil households, but collection of completed forms /
booklets were only strictly enforced when it came to Tamil concentrations. The main purpose of
these booklets was to assist the Police, when they launched cordon and search operations, to
identify visitors or undeclared persons in the area. In the latter part of 2008 there was a
programme of police registration, specifically targeting persons who had temporarily migrated to
Colombo and Western Province from the North and the East of the country.
In May 2010 the newly elected Sri Lankan government announced that whilst extending the
emergency regulations, as is required monthly, certain regulations would be repealed. These
included the restrictions on public marches and meetings, curfews, police entry into private
property without a search warrant, restrictions on terrorist propaganda, and ‗the compulsory
police registration of household members‘.
In July 2010 several Tamil media networks carried the story that police in the Wellawatte Police
Division of Colombo had recommenced the practice of registering Tamils. The Democratic
People‘s Front leader Mano Ganesan was quoted as saying that ―This is being conducted only
The main text of this COI Report contains the most up to date publicly available information as at 3 February 2012.
Further brief information on recent events and reports has been provided in the Latest News section
to 2 March 2012.
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