The Association for Friendship and Love (AFRIEL) and the March 12 Movement have organized an event to bring the presidential candidates onto one platform to initiate a discourse between them and citizens in Sri Lanka, in the run-up to the Presidential election.

The event which will be held on October 5 at the Sugathadasa Indoor Stadium, between 3 pm and 5 pm, will feature a number of presidential candidates selected by a separate committee of the March 12 Movement.

The candidates will be posed a number of questions pooled by citizens in the run up to the event, that have been selected by the committee as pertinent to issues of national interest.

The March 12 Movement is an alliance of a number of civil society organizations such as PAFFREL, CMEV and other academics and thought leaders who are working towards clean politics in Sri Lanka.

At a press briefing held in Colombo this morning, AFRIEL Executive Director Ravindra De Silva said that the AFRIEL Youth Network would also introduce 3, 000 Citizen Reporters from their network at the event. He said the 3, 000 AFRIEL Citizen Reporters have been trained in conjunction with PAFFREL and CMEV to strengthen existing election monitoring capabilities.

While the goal is to hold Presidential candidates accountable to citizens it was also noted that this was the first time in the history of Sri Lanka that a number of civil society organisations had banded together with a common plan and vision to make a change in Sri Lanka.