Suriya Wickremasinghe: Human Rights, the Nadesan Centre and Toasted Butter Cake

“Our most important and intellectually demanding task as archivists is to make an informed selection of information that will provide the future with a representative record of human experience in our time.” Gerald Ham, 1975 

“…libraries were havens of peace in an ever more demanding society, a familiar, reassuring presence…” The Library: A Fragile History

Suriya Wickremasinghe passed away on the morning of April 29, 2026.

As I put pen to paper, I can imagine her gentle protest, “Stop wasting your time; there are far more important things to do than write about me.” Notwithstanding her many accomplishments and a career dedicated to the defense of human rights, Suriya was resolutely self-effacing, much to my frustration and admiration, if one can feel both at the same time. In the short time I knew Suriya, she spoke very little about herself and much about the people she admired and respected, particularly S. Nadesan Q.C. and Bishop Lakshman Wickremasinghe. Suriya lionised collective effort (never “I”, always “we”). She emphasised the duty we had in taking up “the cause of any person whose basic rights are infringed.” She insisted on precision and care. In 1990, when she accepted the Carter-Menil Prize, awarded to the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka (CRM) for its outstanding contributions to the protection of human rights in Sri Lanka, she first paid tribute to the intellect and labour of her late colleagues.

With Suriya’s passing, many of us now feel an impulse to pay tribute to her own intellect and labour. She would have grimaced at the thought of a tribute. She found hagiographic accounts of political lives displeasing. I will, therefore, try to offer an honest telling, devoid of effusive or extreme praise.

Information work for human rights

I first met Suriya in 2020, when I was working on the archives of the Embilipitiya Disappeared Schoolchildren’s Parents’ Organisation (EDSCPO). I needed access to the annual reports of the Human Rights Task Force (HRTF) and the Final Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Involuntary Removal or Disappearance of Persons in the Western, Southern and Sabaragamuwa Provinces. One email to Suriya and three weeks later I had the reports I requested in addition to the judgment of the High Court of Ratnapura and the trial proceedings. Thousands of pages painstakingly inspected and digitised. I informed her that I shared a copy of the judgment with an affected family. She was pleased that the Nadesan Centre could be of service. For me, the generosity of time and advice was what cut through our first interaction. I later learnt that she often went out of her way to make information available to those who needed it. But as she would put it, it was the Centre that was doing the work.

A bit more than a generation and a half between us, Suriya was relatively conversant with certain aspects of information work. A senior lawyer of high repute, she dipped her toes into other fields that advanced the cause and work of the centre. She also did the work. She indexed, she catalogued and she wrote summaries. This was possibly why she never gave short shrift to archivists and librarians. She knew their value, the importance of the work but never presumed herself to know everything. Suriya was more familiar with librarianship, which made our conversations about cataloguing very brief since archival practices and principles were completely different. She would squint and listen intently to me, her fingers tapping at the arms of her chair as I explained the principles of archival arrangement and the archivist’s duty to preserve the evidence of activity. After a few probing questions, she would say with characteristic politeness, “We’ll leave it in your good hands”. But unsurprisingly she would persist with her own list while giving me space to work according to the requirements of my profession.

Her commitment to information work was best exemplified in the publication of 21 Years of CRM: An Annotated List of Documents of the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka 1971-1992. This was compiled in collaboration with her long time comrade, Manel Fonseka. In chronological sequence (save for three records placed at the end of the list), each record of significance carries a title, date, pagination, reference number and relevant annotations. There was enough care to explain, where necessary, the context of a document. The impetus for many in her position would have been to write a history of CRM but for Suriya making people aware of significant records, drawing attention to the activity which created it and then providing further contextual information was a more useful exercise. This was a political act. In its creation, the list was meant to enable the continued use of the records. And what is use, in all its manifestations, if not some form of action?

Nadesan Centre for Human Rights Through Law

In a country replete with civil society institutions that do not understand or value archives and records management, Suriya and her purposing of the Nadesan Centre were remarkably different. She understood the importance of archives, of making them accessible and of enabling their use. She was acutely aware that the diverse collections (beyond the library) at the Nadesan Centre, established in 1987, had a role to play in ongoing activism and research. This is evidenced by the continued documentation of material accessed by users at the centre. Suriya took pride in reporting all instances of use since it spoke to the enduring value of the material and the relevance of the institution as a repository of information and evidence.

Suriya’s commitment to accessibility was one of her most striking principles. Her belief in it may have been conditioned by her own political convictions, her work in various international fora, including the Index on Censorship, and as a lawyer responding to the abuse of emergency regulations throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In her 1992 article on the inaccessibility of emergency regulations, she argued, “The rule that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ when a person is charged with contravening a law, is based on the premise that ‘everyone is presumed to know the law’. This presumption in turn rests on the basis that the law is always ascertainable.” It is possible to safely extend this argument to state that Suriya fundamentally believed information in whatever form should always be ascertainable.

The Nadesan Centre was established to address the requirement of information for human rights groups, activists and researchers inquiring into human rights issues. Manel Fonseka recounts how the centre, complementary to CRM, was “Service-oriented rather than a campaigning organisation, with the aid of a specialised library, providing consultative and advisory services…” Suriya stewarded the development of the library, documentation and information services at the centre and managed as best she could the archives of CRM as well as other material. She was aided by Manel Fonseka, Gnana Hemasiri and many others. It is because of these significant steps in institution building, anchored to the right set of principles and driven by dedicated work, that a body of records, vital to understanding past episodes of violence and the struggle for justice, survives today. Over the last few years, Suriya took comfort in the renewed attention that CRM’s voluminous records, spanning decades of intellectual output and collecting effort, had received.

For example, I managed to initiate a project to catalogue and digitise the 1971-76 prison letters collection. This comprised correspondence received by CRM from the families of prisoners (or victims) and, separately, correspondence received by Suriya as a lawyer, from both prisoners and their family members. The records were created and received in the context of widespread arrests, many arbitrary, by the security apparatus during and after the 1971 JVP insurrection. Suriya along with her trusty comrade, Ranjith Perera, writer and translator, worked closely with me over several months, gradually building a catalogue, deciphering various notations and then proceeding to digitise the material with the assistance of Dhayalini Sivalingam. Suriya kept abreast of everything, sat with us for hours, scrutinised lists, told stories, supplied endless context and always joyfully announced tea time. She never let me forget the project’s administrative burden, a particular peeve given the centre’s sparse resources. Despite this, the project marked the start of our working relationship, which I thought would continue for a few more years.

Toasted butter cake

In conversations with Suriya, usually at her study over a cup of coffee and on occasion with some toasted butter cake and a dollop of Greek yoghurt, she spoke about various experiences and episodes. CRM and the Nadesan Centre occupied most of our conversational time. Reflecting on what the centre had accomplished since its inception, I often advised Suriya to view the centre as both archives and library, a collecting institution and a space for information research and activism – all in service of human rights. While Suriya engaged in my ideas and reassured me that she would discuss matters with the Board of Members, I often walked away feeling as though I was perhaps a decade too late in trying to have this conversation. Although her mind was as sharp as a tack, Suriya was increasingly tired and her health precluded her from substantive engagements, the reform of an institution included. But her love for and commitment to the centre never faded. With every project and every request to work at the centre, I would often receive a call or email expressing her absolute delight at the prospect of the centre becoming a hive of activity once again.

It is unavoidable, then, that this tribute ends with a question about our historical refuge at Charles Circus. One of Suriya’s greatest acts of care – the establishment of Nadesan Centre – was meant to strengthen our collective acts of justice. What happens to it? Nothing there is irrelevant or relegated to a forgotten past; every cabinet, shelf, file, box and every record screams for a future. A collective effort is required to reaffirm the centre’s principles and reimagine its purpose. Sri Lanka still needs an institution centred on information work to meet the challenges of our present and future human rights struggles.

Whatever happens Suriya, rest assured, there will be toasted butter cake.