That experience of the inch of time and the rush of a new cloak of identity have become markers for my memory. I felt the rush waking up as a six-year-old in an apartment at the crest of The Terrace, connecting with the fact that I was now not only a Sri Lankan but also a New Zealander, my family having arrived in 1987. I felt the rush waking up the morning after my mother told me Richard de Zoysa's story. Richard was my father's second-cousin, a journalist in Sri Lanka, killed in 1990 as a result of his courageous criticism of the then Government. The cloak that morning arrived like a wave of outrage. Surely people weren't being tortured and killed by their own Government, and if they were, the cloak demanded I do something about it. It was a story and a feeling that began a 27-year journey in human rights advocacy for me. There is still so much to be done for human rights protection in many countries around the world because "Maṉita urmaikaḷ aṉaivarukkum sontmāṉatu", "Mānava himikam siyallanṭama ayat", which means, in both Tamil and then Sinhala, "Human rights belong to all". 