Whereas May 18, 2024, marks the 15-year anniversary of the end of the 26-year armed conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka and various armed Tamil independence organizations; Whereas the Sinhalese people and the Eelam Tamil people have lived on the island presently known as Sri Lanka for thousands of years and lived in separate and sovereign Sinhalese and Tamil kingdoms, and in 1833, the Sinhalese and the Tamil territories were merged under a single unitary administration by the British; Whereas all major Tamil political parties united under the Tamil United Liberation Front and adopted the Vaddukoddai Resolution on May 14, 1976, asserting the right to self-determination of the Tamil nation and calling for the restoration and reconstitution of an independent, free, sovereign, secular Tamil Eelam as the solution to the Tamils, and in the subsequent election which the Tamils treated as a model referendum, the Tamil people gave their overwhelming electoral mandate for the independent, free, sovereign Tamil Eelam; Whereas the 6th amendment to Sri Lanka’s constitution, introduced in 1983, was targeted towards the Eelam Tamil people to limit their ability to advocate for their independence, and to criminalize such activity, thus the amendment infringes on the Tamils’ freedom of expression which is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Whereas, subsequent to the persistent calls by the international community to resolve the ethnic conflict, Sri Lanka, without any consultations with the Eelam Tamils, unilaterally introduced the 13th amendment to the constitution in 1987, which claimed to be a solution to the conflict but which was rejected by the Eelam Tamil political leaders as not meeting the aspirations of their people, and their homeland still remains as non-self-governing territory