Sri Lankan jurist and human rights activist Basil Fernando, a former leader of the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission, has died at 81.
Born in Sri Lanka in 1944, Fernando was a lawyer, author and poet who worked for decades on human rights and rule-of-law issues across Asia.
Fernando was an Appeals Counsel for Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong as part of a project sponsored by the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), from 1989 to 1992. From 1992 to 1993, he was a Senior United Nations Human Rights Officer-In Charge of the Investigation Unit in Cambodia under the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).
He was the Officer in Charge and the Chief of the Legal Assistance at the Cambodia Office of the United Nations Center for Human Rights from 1993 to 1994.
He joined the Asian Human Rights Commission in 1994 and served as its executive director, working to document rights violations and link grassroots human rights efforts with campaigns for institutional and legal reform.
Fernando was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2005 and received the Right Livelihood Award in 2014 for his work supporting and documenting the implementation of human rights in Asia. The award is also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.”
He also received the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights in 2001 and worked with the United Nations in Cambodia before moving into senior human rights advocacy in Asia.
Fernando was born on Oct. 14, 1944. (Newswire)
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