When the governing council of the University of Peradeniya voted in May 2020 to discard the findings of its own formal disciplinary inquiry, which had found a senior professor guilty of cyberstalking, repeated physical touching and sustained emotional abuse of a junior colleague under his academic supervision, it may have assumed the matter was over. Dr. W. A. M. Udari L. Abeyasinghe, the junior colleague at the centre of the complaint and a dentist and lecturer at the same faculty, had already indicated that she did not wish to pursue a criminal case. The university system, it seemed, had simply waited her out.
But on May 8, 2026, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court reopened that history in extraordinary fashion. A three-judge bench comprising Justices Janak De Silva, Achala Wengappuli and K. Priyantha Fernando delivered its judgment in Abeyasinghe v. Thilakaratne and Others (S.C.F.R. Application No. 81/2021), a ruling that legal scholars are already describing as one of the most consequential decisions on workplace sexual harassment in the country’s judicial history.
Although the court upheld a technical objection that the petition had been filed too late to qualify as a fundamental rights violation, it refused to allow procedure alone to bury the substance of what had occurred.
Exercising what the Constitution describes as its 'just and equitable' jurisdiction, the Supreme Court imposed a lifetime ban on Prof. W. M. Thilakaratne from holding any paid, unpaid or honorary position at any university, educational institution or academic body in Sri Lanka. Thilakaratne, a former dean of the Faculty of Dental Sciences at the University of Peradeniya and past president of the International Association of Oral Pathologists, is currently listed by the World Dental Congress as a professor of oral pathology and senior consultant at the University of Malaya.
The court also directed the University Grants Commission to enforce the ban across all institutions under its authority and ordered the University of Peradeniya to conduct mandatory annual seminars on gender-based harassment for all staff and students indefinitely.
A Council That Walked Away
The harassment, the court found, took place between July 2017 and April 2018. Dr. Abeyasinghe was then an assistant lecturer and an M.Phil. student whose co-supervisor was Prof. Thilakaratne, placing her in the acutely vulnerable position of someone whose academic future depended in part on the goodwill of the person who was abusing her.
In July 2018, her mother filed a written complaint with the Vice Chancellor. A preliminary inquiry followed, which recommended a full disciplinary hearing. A charge sheet was issued. Prof. Thilakaratne answered it. A three-member formal inquiry committee sat from July to September 2019.
The committee found him guilty on charges covering cyberstalking through mobile phone communication; repeated unwanted physical contact, including frequent hugging, stroking her hands, and touching her back and legs despite her explicit objections over nearly ten months; causing severe distress in both her personal and professional life; violating the university's sexual harassment policy and staff code of conduct; breaching the University Grants Commission Establishments Code; inflicting mental and physical harassment; and bringing both his office and the university into disrepute. He was acquitted on four sub-charges, the specific content of which the judgment does not reproduce.
The findings cited multiple violations under the UGC Establishments Code, including Sections 2:2:4 through 2:2:8.
The committee’s report was submitted to the University Council, the institution’s highest governing body, at its 493rd meeting in May 2020.
The Council rejected the findings, stating that the committee had failed to give adequate consideration to the delay between the alleged harassment and the filing of the formal complaint.
It decided that no disciplinary action would be taken against Prof. Thilakaratne.
Dr. Abeyasinghe, the Council added, was free to pursue redress through other avenues.
Dr. Abeyasinghe wrote to the Chairman of the University Grants Commission. The UGC asked the Council to reconsider. The Council, at its 497th meeting in September 2020, declined. It stood by its earlier decision.
In December 2020, Dr. Abeyasinghe filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. In March 2021, she came to the Supreme Court.
The Procedural Trap — and the Way Around It
The case arrived at the Supreme Court carrying a formidable legal obstacle. Under Article 126 of the Constitution, fundamental rights petitions must ordinarily be filed within one month of the alleged infringement. The Council's decision had been communicated to Dr. Abeyasinghe in July 2020. Her petition was filed in March 2021 — more than eight months later.
The 28th through 66th respondents, including the chairman of the University Grants Commission, as well as multiple successive deans and council members named in the proceedings, strongly pressed this procedural objection.
Justice Janak de Silva, writing for a unanimous bench, carefully examined Sri Lankan legal precedent on “continuing violations” and ultimately concluded that it could not preserve the petition.
The court held that Dr. Abeyasinghe’s visits to the UGC did not constitute a legally mandated process capable of interrupting the limitation period.
Her complaint to the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, filed only in December 2020, also failed to overcome the time bar, as there was no evidence that the commission had conducted or even commenced an inquiry.
Citing its earlier ruling in Kandambi v. State Timber Corporation, the court reaffirmed that Sri Lankan law requires a petitioner to demonstrate not merely that a complaint was filed with the Human Rights Commission, but that an actual inquiry had begun.
Accordingly, the court held that the constitutional time limitation remained in force.
Then the court took the far rarer step of looking beyond the procedural barrier altogether.
Article 126(4) of the Constitution grants the Supreme Court power to grant "such relief or make such directions in the case as it may deem just and equitable" — a provision that Sri Lankan courts have long interpreted broadly. In Noble Resources International Pte Limited v. Siyambalapitiya (2016), then-Chief Justice Sripavan had held that this provision allows the court to issue directions "even where no infringement or imminent infringement has been found." Justice De Silva cited that ruling directly and applied it without hesitation.
His rationale was specific and considered. Prof. Thilakaratne had never sought to challenge or have set aside the formal inquiry committee's findings. As a matter of law — as the court confirmed by reference to a sequence of Court of Appeal and Supreme Court decisions — an administrative order is not void or a nullity until a court formally declares it so. The committee's findings, in other words, remained on the record, uncontested, entirely valid.
"These are very serious findings," the judgment stated, "which the 1st Respondent has not sought to impugn. The fact that the Council did not act upon it does not in any way make it void or a nullity."
A Lifetime Ban and a Systemic Mandate
The court then issued directives that extended far beyond the immediate dispute, reshaping the institutional consequences of the case.
Prof. Thilakaratne was barred from accepting any paid, unpaid or honorary position at any university or educational institution in Sri Lanka. The University Grants Commission was ordered to circulate that prohibition across all institutions under its authority, ensuring that the ban would carry national force. The University of Peradeniya, along with its governing council and other relevant respondents, was also directed to take concrete steps to enforce and expand awareness of its sexual harassment policy, including mandatory annual seminars for academics, staff and students.
The ruling was unanimous. Justices Achala Wengappuli and K. Priyantha Fernando joined the judgment without issuing separate opinions.
Why the Delay — and Why the Court Said So Plainly
One of the most striking passages in Justice De Silva's judgment is his direct engagement with the question that the University Council had used to dismiss the complaint in the first place: the delay in reporting.
Rather than treat the delay as a suspicious gap, or leave it as an unexplained procedural problem, the court cited a 2016 judgment by Justice Gooneratne in Manohari Pelaketiya v. Gunasekera: that continuous abuse and sexual harassment over time causes physical and mental damage; that it is not possible for a female in such circumstances to resist unless she is a person of exceptional resilience; and that continuous threats can render a person physically and mentally unwell. "This," Justice De Silva wrote simply, "explains the delay in the making of the first complaint."
The court also went further, anchoring the prohibition against harassment in Sri Lanka's constitutional and international obligations. Article 14(1)(g) of the Constitution guarantees the freedom to engage in a lawful occupation — and that freedom, the court held, depends upon "the creation of an environment free from sexual harassment." Sri Lanka is a signatory to CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, ratified without reservation.
CEDAW's General Recommendation No. 19 specifically identifies sexual harassment in the workplace as a form of gender discrimination that can be humiliating, constitute a health and safety problem, and impair equality in employment when women have reasonable grounds to believe that objecting to it will disadvantage them professionally.
A Systemic Crisis With Few Institutional Answers
Sexual and gender-based violence within Sri Lanka's state university system has been documented with increasing specificity in recent years. A 2021 study by the UGC conducted jointly with UNICEF found that ragging, which frequently incorporates sexual harassment, affected significant numbers of students across state universities, and that the environment of power imbalances within academia creates particular vulnerability for junior researchers, postgraduate students, and women in junior academic posts.
The relationship between a postgraduate student and a senior supervisor who also sits on hiring and promotion committees, controls publication opportunities, and shapes professional networks is one of near-total dependence. International research has consistently documented that this dependence suppresses reporting: junior academics weigh the consequences of a complaint against the possibility of losing their career trajectory entirely.
Sri Lanka's legal framework on sexual harassment has also been fragmentary. Section 345 of the Penal Code criminalises the conduct, but academic environments have additional institutional mechanisms, university policies, UGC Establishments Code provisions, that were designed to handle such matters internally. The Abeyasinghe case illustrates precisely what happens when those internal mechanisms are turned in the opposite direction: a formal inquiry finds guilt, and the governing council uses its discretion not to enforce the finding, but to discard it.
The Supreme Court's judgment closes that gap, at least in part. By holding that uncontested inquiry findings remain valid regardless of what a council does with them, and by invoking its just and equitable jurisdiction to impose consequences that the university would not impose on itself, the court has signalled that institutional inaction is not a shield — it is itself a form of failure that the judiciary will address.
What the Ruling Means Going Forward
The judgment’s sweeping remedy, while widely praised by many legal observers, also raises complex questions about the outer limits of judicial power. The Supreme Court imposed a permanent nationwide academic ban without formally finding a fundamental rights violation, relying instead on disciplinary findings that the University of Peradeniya’s own governing council had chosen not to enforce. That expansive use of the court’s just and equitable jurisdiction is likely to invite continued legal debate.
The university council’s original justification was not entirely devoid of legal grounding. Its members argued that the inquiry committee had failed to adequately consider the delay between the alleged harassment and the filing of the formal complaint, an issue that disciplinary bodies often weigh when assessing credibility. Practical limitations also remain. Prof. Thilakaratne is currently listed as a professor at the University of Malaya, and the Supreme Court’s directives apply only within Sri Lanka’s jurisdiction.
Yet the broader legal significance of the ruling is unmistakable. Sri Lankan courts have previously used just and equitable powers in cases involving public administration, procurement disputes and environmental governance. Their application in a workplace sexual harassment case, however, marks a striking evolution. Here, the court did not merely review institutional process. It intervened directly where an institution had declined to act on its own validated findings.
In doing so, the judgment establishes several important principles. A university council’s refusal to enforce a disciplinary finding does not erase or invalidate that finding. The Supreme Court may rely on substantiated misconduct as the basis for relief even when procedural barriers prevent a conventional constitutional remedy. And the University Grants Commission can be compelled not only to oversee academic standards, but also to enforce sanctions designed to protect those standards.
The court's order requiring mandatory annual sexual harassment awareness seminars at the University of Peradeniya is separately significant. By making the requirement permanent rather than symbolic, the bench transformed institutional reform into a continuing legal obligation, one that may shape how universities across Sri Lanka address harassment in the years ahead.
Dr. Abeyasinghe was represented by Ermiza Tegal with Linuri Munasinghe. Prof. Thilakaratne was represented by Saliya Pieris, PC, with Jagaseesha Ranasinghe. The University Grants Commission and university respondents were represented by Senior State Counsel Sureka Ahmed.
Now serving as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Oral Pathology at the University of Peradeniya, Dr. Abeyasinghe had already called publicly for stronger legal protections against workplace sexual harassment before the judgment was delivered. In important respects, the Supreme Court’s ruling answered that demand not through legislative reform, but through the constitutional authority it already possessed.
The Letter That Started Everything
The formal proceedings that produced this week's Supreme Court judgment began with a mother's handwritten letter to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Peradeniya, dated July 2018.
C. Abeyasinghe, Dr. Udari Abeyasinghe's mother, wrote to the university after watching her daughter deteriorate over months of escalating harassment. "My daughter has faced several unpleasant experiences and emotional abuse while she was at work," she wrote. "With time, these harassments started occurring on a daily basis. Udari was reluctant to go to work. She started to lose weight. She was unable to sleep well at night. She was not the joyful, happy, light-hearted girl she used to be."
The letter acknowledged, with a precision that now reads as prophetic, the structural trap her daughter was caught in: the professor she was complaining about was simultaneously her academic supervisor, one of the gatekeepers of her M.Phil. degree, and a figure with influence over whether she would secure a permanent lectureship in the same faculty. "I am afraid that this complaint might affect her career and academic prospects," the mother wrote. She asked the university to take interim protective measures.
The letter was copied to the Chairperson of the University of Peradeniya's Committee to Investigate Sexual Harassment and Sexual Violence. The university's SGBV By-Laws explicitly permit third-party complaints, meaning a parent, colleague or other person may initiate a complaint on behalf of a survivor who is unable or unwilling to do so herself. It was this provision that allowed the case to begin at all.
On Mother's Day, May 11, 2026, three days after the Supreme Court's judgment, Dr. Abeyasinghe posted the latter part of that letter to her Facebook page, alongside a tribute to her mother.
"Had it not been for her complaint and her courage to stand by me, my chances of surviving within the university system would have been close to zero," Dr. Abeyasinghe wrote. "On this Mother's Day, I wish that all mothers may have the strength to endure pressure, the wisdom to recognize abuse, and the courage to stand beside their daughters and sons when the world asks them to stay silent — just as my Amma did."
She added: "I am posting the latter part of the complaint she wrote to the university in 2018, because none of what followed, including this week's judgment, would have been possible had she not taken that first step."
