Sunila abeysekera biography template

Sri Lankan human rights campaigner

Sunila Abeysekera (September 4 1952 – September 9, 2013) was a Sri Lankan human rights campaigner.

Sunila Abeysekera became an actress and singer while still at school and went on to become a theatre critic.

Sunila began her activism in the mids as part of Sri Lanka's first autonomous human rights organization – the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) – a nonpartisan.

Sunila exemplified how the global and local intersect.

Sunila has been a lifelong feminist and human rights activist in Sri Lanka and South Asia, and a major player in the global women's movement.

That's a fact: Sunila was not a nationalist, although she was Sinhala-speaking and was born into a Buddhist family.

She worked on women's rights in Sri Lanka and in the South Asia region for decades as an activist and scholar. Quitting a career as a singer, Abeysekera briefly joined the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and then founded the Women and Media Collective in 1984.

As head of the INFORM Human Rights Documentation Centre, she monitored human rights violations by all parties in the civil war. She received the United Nations Human Rights Award in 1999 and the Didi Nirmala Deshpande South Asian Peace and Justice Award in 2013.^[1]

Early life

Sunila was born on 4 September 1952, to Turin and Charles Abeysekera, a public servant and a leader of civil society in Sri Lanka.^[2] She first became involved in politics in the 1970s as a member of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), which campaigned for political prisoners who had b