Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka Human Rights

Learn about AIUSA’s Sri Lanka campaign

Human Rights Concerns

Over the past year, Sri Lanka has faced a catastrophic economic crisis with severe shortages in essential medicines, food and cooking gas.  Fuel shortages have resulted in daily power cuts.  Inflation has sharply increased the cost of living.  Thousands have protested the government’s mismanagement of the economy.  In response, the government has used unlawful force against protesters and attempted to stifle dissent through arbitrary arrests, detention and torture.  Following massive protests on July 9, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country a few days later and then resigned.  Acting President Ranil Wickremesinghe was elected as President by Parliament on July 20.  The government has subsequently arrested over 140 protesters and protest organizers, routinely ignoring due process and using the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) to detain three protesters.  The PTA has been used in the past to target minorities, journalists and dissenting voices.  Amnesty International USA has recently launched a campaign to protect the right to protest in Sri Lanka, specifically calling on the Sri Lankan government to repeal the PTA.  Click on the link above to go to the campaign landing page, with more information and several online actions.  Please read the campaign materials, take the online actions and share them widely.  For the latest AIUSA press releases on the campaign, please see the links below in the Newsroom section.

The current AIUSA campaign on Sri Lanka now also includes a photo action.  We would like as many people as possible to take a photo of themselves holding one of the signs we’ve created for this action (or using the sign as background in the photo) and to share their photos on social media.  Directions for how to participate in the photo action and a link to the signs for the photo action can both be found below.

On March 22, 2023, the Sri Lankan government published the draft Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), which is proposed to replace the PTA.  The bill does not comply with international standards.  Offenses under the ATA are not precisely defined but are broad, vague and subjective.  The ATA retains provisions to enable prolonged detention (up to one year) without charge or trial. It facilitates torture, especially in a context that is rife with allegations of torture in custody.  It gives the military arrest and detention powers that should only be provided to the police. It retains unchecked powers of the executive without sufficient judicial oversight.  The ATA must not be enacted in its current form; it must be substantially revised or dropped.

The situation of human rights in Sri Lanka needs to be understood in the context of its recent history.  Over the past 40 years, two separate internal armed conflicts resulted in war crimes and human rights abuses being committed by both sides in both conflicts.  In the vast majority of cases, no one has been held accountable for these crimes.  Apart from these armed conflicts, torture of detainees in custody is widespread and systemic.  Up to 100,000 enforced disappearances have been reported, both in connection with the conflicts and in their aftermath.  While no executions have been carried out in Sri Lanka since 1976, the death penalty remains on the books.  Use of the PTA has facilitated arbitrary detention and torture.  Buddhist extremists in the Sinhalese majority community have attacked Christian and Muslim minorities in recent years, causing some deaths and extensive property damage, with the security forces standing by or on occasion being complicit in some attacks.  The Easter Sunday bombings in April 2019 saw the emergence in Sri Lanka for the first time of violence by members of a local Islamist group against members of the Christian minority and foreign tourists.

In the late 1980s, the People’s Liberation Front, a Sinhalese chauvinist group (known by their initials in Sinhala as the JVP), carried out an armed insurrection against the government.  The conflict saw targeted and indiscriminate killings of civilians, thousands of enforced disappearances of suspected JVP supporters, and arbitrary detentions and torture.  The insurrection ended with a government victory in 1990.

During 1983 – 2009, Sri Lanka was wracked by a civil war between the security forces (who are mostly Sinhalese) and the armed Tamil opposition group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were seeking an independent state for the Tamil minority in the north and east of the island. The war ended in May 2009, with a government military victory over the LTTE.  A war crimes investigation by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights found in 2015 that both government forces and the LTTE had committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and other human rights violations.  One emblematic case of war crimes committed by the security forces is the murder of five Tamil students by the security forces in 2006 in the northeastern town of Trincomalee; see below for more information on the students (known as the “Trinco Five”).

Since 2009, cases of torture have continued to be reported, with no one being held responsible.  Journalists, activists and human rights defenders have been attacked.  At least 14 media workers have been the victims of unlawful killings since the beginning of 2006; one has allegedly disappeared in the custody of the security forces (see below for more information on the case of Prageeth Eknaligoda), while others have been tortured and arbitrarily detained.

The United States should include Sri Lanka in an inter-agency atrocity prevention board review to create a set of policy recommendations that will prevent a return to grave human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. U.S. officials must reiterate to the Sri Lankan government the importance of upholding human rights, including by repealing the PTA and by attending court hearings in key cases such as the Trinco Five students and Prageeth Eknaligoda.  Congress should speak out about the need for PTA repeal and should substantially increase civil society assistance for Sri Lankan human rights groups that are working on truth and reconciliation issues and protecting human rights defenders.

For the 16th anniversary on Jan. 2, 2022 of the killing of the Trinco Five students, some AIUSA activists created a 1:31 video about their case.  A link to the video is given below.

For the 12th anniversary on Jan. 24, 2022 of the enforced disappearance of journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda, activists from Amnesty International USA and Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand created two short videos about his case.  Links to both videos follow below.

On Feb. 10, 2023, Jim McDonald, AIUSA Sri Lanka Country Specialist, was interviewed on WRFI about AIUSA’s current campaign on Sri Lanka.  A link to that interview is given below.

Please see the links below for all the actions.  Thanks for any help you can give on these actions.