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# Sumanthiran Plans Campaign Against Sri Lanka's Proposed Counterterrorism Law
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/sumanthiran-plans-campaign-against-sri-lankas-proposed-counterterrorism-law/
- Published: 2026-10-04T05:00:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-04T13:55:57.000Z
- Author: Our Reporter
- Tags: October  2026

**COLOMBO, Sri Lanka —** A coalition of Sri Lankan lawyers and activists will begin a public campaign next week against the government’s proposed counterterrorism law, saying the bill retains many of the powers that made the country’s Prevention of Terrorism Act notorious, according to M.A. Sumanthiran, a constitutional lawyer and the acting general secretary of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK).

The Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill was published in the government gazette on Sept. 22\. It would repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, a 1979 law that rights groups have for decades linked to prolonged detention without trial and torture in custody.

Mr. Sumanthiran, a President's Counsel and former Tamil National Alliance lawmaker from Jaffna, said Sarvajana Neethi, a civil society initiative he represents, would lead the campaign. He accused the governing National People's Power coalition of abandoning its position in opposition when its members joined campaigns calling for the act's repeal. The campaign, he said, would remind the public of that record and explain the dangers its organizers see in the new bill.

The Prevention of Terrorism Act was passed as a temporary measure in the early years of the conflict between the state and Tamil separatist groups, and was made permanent in 1982\. It allows suspects to be held for long periods without charge and permits confessions made to police officers to be used as evidence, a departure from ordinary criminal law. During the civil war, which ended in 2009, it was used overwhelmingly against Tamils. After the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019, it was used widely against Muslims. Human Rights Watch has said the law has been associated with arbitrary detention and torture.

Successive governments have promised to replace it, often under international pressure. The European Union made reform of the act a condition of restoring Sri Lanka's preferential trade access under its GSP+ program in 2017, and the United Nations Human Rights Council has repeatedly called for its repeal. Rights groups criticized a Counter Terrorism Bill drafted in 2018, and an Anti-Terrorism Bill gazetted in 2023 as reproducing the act's core powers, and neither became law. A 2022 amendment reduced the maximum period of detention without charge but left the law in place.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's coalition campaigned on repealing the act and won a two-thirds majority in Parliament in November 2024, enough to pass the new bill without opposition support. Rights groups criticized the government in 2025 when the police used the existing act to detain a young Muslim man accused of putting up stickers critical of Israel.

The Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Colombo research group that reviewed the bill after it was gazetted, said the latest draft includes safeguards missing from earlier versions but retains what it called fundamental problems carried over from the old law.

The bill would allow terrorism suspects to be held before trial under executive detention orders, outside the ordinary criminal process. It would also give members of the armed forces powers of arrest, search and investigation. Critics say those functions should belong to the civilian police, with the military involved only in exceptional circumstances.

The center also raised concerns about the broad definition of terrorism, restrictions on freedom of expression and association, and special rules on the use of statements made by suspects as evidence.

"Merely being better than the PTA does not make the PSTB – 2026 consistent with Sri Lanka's constitutional guarantees," the center said in its assessment. It said counterterrorism laws must meet standards of legality, necessity, proportionality and nondiscrimination.

Rights advocates say the government should prosecute terrorism offenses under the ordinary criminal law wherever possible, instead of maintaining a separate system with extraordinary detention and enforcement powers.

The government has presented the bill as a modern counterterrorism framework that would end the decades-old act, and it revised several provisions that drew criticism in earlier drafts.

Once the bill is placed on Parliament's order paper, citizens may challenge its constitutionality before the Supreme Court.