The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake
Bimal Rathnayake responded to concerns about compensation for families of COVID-19 victims who were forcibly cremated, noting the Minister had cited legal constraints and would seek the Attorney General’s advice. He said monetary compensation may not adequately address the pain caused, but that any committee recommendation on compensation could be considered comprehensively. He then proposed moving to the next item of business due to time constraints and prior discussion.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 The Hon. Minister provided the total figure and explained the legal constraints on disclosing details, noting he would seek the Attorney General’s advice. However, I also wonder whether compensating the deceased’s families might be seen as an affront to the dead. We can discuss compensation; I do not know whether this wound can be priced in money. We have never expected compensation for our people who were massacred. But if a committee discusses and recommends monetary compensation for forced cremations of COVID victims, we can consider it comprehensively. In my view, not even a billion dollars can heal that pain. Nonetheless, we will consider what you propose.
¶ 02 Given there has been adequate discussion from both Government and Opposition, and as time is limited, I propose we proceed to the next business.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Tuesday, 17 December 2024 ·No. 1734685396083959 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
- Permalink
/lk/speeches/18173
Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 17 December 2024. No. 1734685396083959. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/18173