Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Sri Lanka’s jailing of a Tamil journalist for 20 years shows the country’s media is under threat, the U.S. said.

J.S. Tissainayagam, a magazine editor and publisher, was sentenced by the Colombo High Court yesterday after being found guilty of terrorism-related offenses. President Barack Obama referred to him in May as one of the ‘emblematic examples” of prosecuted journalists in the world.

The U.S. is “concerned about the state of media freedom in Sri Lanka,” the State Department said in a statement. “We were disappointed to learn of the verdict and the severity of the sentence.”

Sri Lanka’s government accused Tissainayagam of supporting the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in its fight for a separate Tamil homeland in the north and east of the country. The army routed the LTTE’s last forces, killing its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and his commanders, in a battle on the northeast coast in May.

“Journalists remain under threat and consequently continue to practice self-censorship,” the State Department said. It called on the Sri Lankan government to “do everything it can to ensure Tissainayagam’s health and safety in prison,” according to the statement.

Tissainayagam, the editor and publisher of North Eastern Monthly magazine, was arrested under emergency regulations on March 7, 2008. He was the first journalist to be charged under the country’s anti-terrorism law, the State Department said in its Human Rights Report last year.

Found Guilty

The editor was found guilty of attempting to cause the commission of acts of violence or racial or communal disharmony and collecting or obtaining information for the purpose of terrorism, the government said in a statement on the Defense Ministry Web site.

“The prosecution showed that Tissainayagam had strong links with the LTTE and supported it through his actions, for which he was indicted,” it said.

Tissainayagam’s articles in the now-defunct magazine, in 2006 and 2007, denounced the government’s conduct in the conflict and said the authorities had used the denial of food and other essential items to the Tamil-majority areas as a tool of war, the Associated Press reported.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government should drop the case against the editor whose only crime was to express his political views, Human Rights Watch said yesterday,

The verdict highlights “glaring fair trial violations,” the New York-based group said in an e-mailed statement. It “furthered the impression in Sri Lanka and abroad that Tissainayagam’s prosecution is part of a government campaign of repression against independent media.”

Political Case

The Asian Human Rights Commission said in a statement it is “saddened, disappointed and shocked” by the judgment. “This is purely a political case,” it said, and the greatest loser “is the justice system and judiciary in Sri Lanka.”

Obama said May 1 that, throughout the world, there were journalists in jail or subject to harassment and “emblematic examples of this distressing reality are figures like J.S. Tissainayagam in Sri Lanka or Shi Tao and Hu Jia in China.”

Media freedom and rule of law must co-exist for democracy to flourish, Sri Lanka’s Defense Ministry said on its Web Site.

“It is imperative that the media rights groups be able to separate journalism from terrorism and help identify terror advocates masquerading as journalists,” it said.

Election Coverage

Reporters Without Borders criticized the government for preventing journalists from covering local elections held in Jaffna and Vavuniya on Aug. 8, the first held in the north since the defeat of the LTTE.

Journalists were stopped from covering the events “on the vaguest of security grounds,” the Paris-based group said.

Sri Lanka is being pressed by the U.S. and United Nations to resettle more than 280,000 mostly Tamil refugees still in camps in the north after the civil war ended.

Rains have brought flooding to the camps, bringing the threat of disease and making the swift return of refugees essential, Eric Schwartz, the U.S. assistant secretary of state population, refugees and migration, said last month.

The government says a plan to return all refugees to their homes by December depends on mines being cleared in former conflict zones and security being established in the north.

The LTTE is designated as a terrorist organization by Sri Lanka, as well as the U.S., the European Union and India.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jay Shankar in Bangalore at jshankar1@bloomberg.net; Paul Tighe at ptighe@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 31, 2009 21:27 EDT