Rohan Jayasekera (writer)

Rohan Jayasekera (born January 1961) is an English freelance journalist and advocate specialising in freedom of expression rights issues in conflict zones and repressive states. He was born in Holloway, North London, of mixed Sri Lankan-Scots-Irish parentage.

Jayasekera began his journalistic career as an apprentice reporter in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire in 1980, worked for a variety of London and national newspapers during the 1980s and 1990s before going abroad, covering half a dozen conflicts thereafter including Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a former managing editor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting and former deputy CEO of the UK quarterly magazine Index on Censorship, where he was responsible for the charity's international programmes and fundraising. He is now a freelance digital publisher managing a series of new R&D, advocacy and journalism projects on freedom of expression rights issues in conflict zones and repressive states

Between 2008 and the years running up to and during the Arab Spring, Jayasekera chaired the Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), a campaigning group of 21 Arab and international free expression rights groups supporting dissidents in Tunisia.

Jayasekera's maternal grandfather left Ireland as a child, fought Moselyites in Cable Street and spent the war in the Royal Navy, which exposed him to three life changing experiences: US segregation in Norfolk, Virginia; Soviet segregation in Murmansk, Siberia, and the war itself. His paternal grandfather was the first Sinhalese owner-manager of an independent plantation in pre-war Sri Lanka. His uncle was Kingsley Jayasekera, a Sri Lankan singer, actor and play producer.

Between 2001 and 2004, Jayasekera ran an associated blog for the UK quarterly magazine Index on Censorship at www.indexonline.org. In May 2001, he provoked outrage from critics of the Holocaust denier David Irving by agreeing to share a stage with him at the Oxford Union to oppose the proposition that "this house would restrict the free speech of extremists". The previous year a High Court judge had found that Mr Irving was "an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism". Strong protest followed, including direct appeals to the then chair of the board, Michael Grade, and objections from some of Jayasekera's colleagues.

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