It is a country that has brought us the great disillusionment of a human rights activist who becomes president only to eat away at those very same rights.

Yet it is not alone in the world. It is not even close to the worst in the world, although it has endured some of the worst moments. If the only humans rights test a country had to pass were that it not be the worst of the worst, then Sri Lanka would pass judgement.

Balancing these human rights abuses have been an enduring democracy, flawed and inadequate as it has been at times. A simulacrum of an independent judiciary has survived. Civil society has grown.

What intertwines human rights so deeply in the history of Sri Lanka is not that it has been the worst of societies, any more than it has been the best. It is that from the very beginning of the country’s independence, human rights have always been the central contested terrain of struggle.

The history of Sri Lanka can only really be written and understood as a history of the struggle for human rights.

And the contest over freedom of expression has always been at the heart of that contest. And that’s why as human rights have again started to deteriorate in Sri Lanka under the impact of war and communal conflict, freedom of expression is being eaten away by government, by military, by paramilitaries, by terrorists and even at times by those who have the greatest vested interest in human rights – the media and the judiciary.

As a result, the Sri Lankan people have been denied their right to know, journalists and others committed to reporting the truth have been bashed, abducted or murdered.

Once again, freedom of expression has become the centre of the struggle because you cannot have a society founded on human rights without the right of freedom of expression. And, you cannot have freedom of expression without a society founded on human rights.

Freedom of expression underpins some other rights directly – the right to practice your religion freely, the right to peaceful assembly as well as freedom of speech or, narrowest of all, freedom of the media. None of these rights exists without the right to freely express

It’s integral to the rights of women, minority groups and disadvantaged groups. They cannot be empowered without being empowered through their own freedom to express themselves. That’s why I have no truck with those who argue that freedom of expression is marginal to the struggles of the disadvantaged. Those struggles cannot even have the words to express themselves if they are not empowered to speak.

It’s reflected in the right to freely express yourself in your own language, without having one single language imposed.

It’s bundled up in the right to a fair trial – part of a fair trial is to be tried in the open.

And it underpins all other rights – rights of security, rights against arbitrary arrest, rights to citizenship, rights against torture because it – along with an independent judiciary – is the means for enforcing these rights. It’s the means for exposing abuse and by exposing end them

Freedom of expression is the catalyst that enables every other right to be freely exercised.

While freedom of the press is really only a subset of the broader right of freedom expression, traditionally, it’s been through journalists bravely exercising our craft here in Sri Lanka that the struggle for human rights has been reported and made known.

And that’s why right now, journalists, themselves, are the targets for abuse.

Like every other person, a journalist has a right against abduction, against illegal imprisonment, against torture and against murder. Yet now, for reporting, for analyzing, for questioning, for – in short – doing their job, many journalists find themselves in the vortex of spiraling human rights abuse in Sri Lanka.

Journalists and the media bear some responsibility for this. Too many journalists are prepared to place ethnic bias over professional solidarity. Too many are prepared to accept unquestioningly the line fed them by security forces. Too many are cheerleaders for war, rather than reporters.

Yet while, it is too many, most journalists have not fallen for this trap. The solidarity of the media community in Sri Lanka – reflected in the coming together of the five organization – is a model for the island. The media community – the journalists community -- It is the only community that appears to be capable of transcending the divisions that cause so much havoc in Sri Lanka.

It is this support and solidarity that makes bearable the pressures that journalists are now facing.

It is easy in this environment to think things will only get worse.

But journalists are making a difference. And the more that journalists understand the imperatives of human rights reporting, understand the centrality of human rights reporting to journalism and to Sri Lanka, the greater the difference that will be made.

The difference this time around is that journalists in Sri Lanka are no longer alone.

Too often, we moan the way in which emerging information technologies are shattering the monopoly we used to enjoy as the sole conduit of information to our communities. It is making our lives much less comfortable than they used to be.

But in the struggle for human rights, the new technologies are an invaluable ally. Now, newspapers, radio, tv are no longer the sole source of information. Bloggers, citizen journalists, web sites all add immeasurably to the mix, although none of them are a substitute for independent journalism.

But they do more than simply add to the total volume of information.

The potential of these technologies shatters the paradigm that successive Sri Lankan governments have followed. They cannot shut off the faucet of news and information by political appointments to run state-owned media, pressuring advertisers to abandon independent media and threatening, abusing and murdering journalists.

Coupled with this is the fact that the world is increasingly global today. No government in Sri Lanka can expect to escape scrutiny or criticism for human rights abuses. A nationalist-minded government may resent this. It may strike against it. But it knows in its heart that it has to live with it.

Despite these two changes – the two significant changes that define the 21st century – when it comes to human rights and freedom of expression, the Sri Lankan government is like a general fighting the last war, using the tactics that worked so well in the 1980s and at a lost to understand why they do not work this time around.

And as they struggle to understand, the government and their military and paramilitary allies, lash out ever more wildly and ever more journalists fall victim to their failure to understand the world in which we all live.

On the other hand, the challenge for us as journalists, as human rights activists, is to turn these two trends that define our times to our advantage.

Journalists, the media and civil society need to consider how we can use communication technologies to break through government control and report news and information to the Sri Lankan community and to the world. I know much is already happening in this area, but the potential to do more is great.

At the same time, we need to continue to work to bring international solidarity to bear on Sri Lanka.

Like you, my country is an island. But in a world of global human rights, no countries are islands any more.

[Speech notes for Christopher Warren, immediate past President, International Federation of Journalists, at "Reporting on Human Rights in Sr Lanka" a two day summit held in Colombo on July 5th and 6th 2008. The summit was organised by the International Federation of Journalists and Centre for Policy Alternatives, with the support of the European Union]