Sri Lanka's New Anti-Terror Bill Replicates the Abuses It Was Supposed to End

Colombo promised to repeal its notorious PTA. The replacement bill grants military police powers, criminalizes social media posts with 15-year sentences, and risks blowing up the country's EU trade preferences.

Sri Lanka's governing National People's Power faction, led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, campaigned in 2024 on repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act — a law that has enabled arbitrary detention and torture for decades. The replacement, the Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA), is now drawing fire from domestic lawyers, international rights bodies, and the country's own Supreme Court for reproducing the core pathologies of the law it claims to retire.

The structural problem is definitional. The bill's definition of terrorism is so broad that human rights lawyer Visakesa Chandrasekaram calls it "highly problematic" and "unclear." That vagueness is not a drafting oversight — it is a feature that lets the executive decide, after the fact, what counts as terrorism. Section 9 extends this reach to social media, where sharing content deemed a terrorism offense carries up to 15 years of rigorous imprisonment. Lawyer Dhanushka Silva is blunt: the PSTA is "a replica of the PTA." The bill's most alarming structural innovation is conferring police powers on the military. Chandrasekaram warns this amounts to militarizing law enforcement, handing investigation and detention authority to an institution neither trained for criminal procedure nor equipped to protect the rights of suspects. Security forces would be empowered to stop, search, question, enter premises, and seize items on the basis of "reasonable suspicion" — a threshold that, combined with the vague terrorism definition, creates an almost limitless mandate. The 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, which killed 270 people and injured over 500 in coordinated bombings of churches and hotels, remain the emotional anchor for the government's case. The attacks were Sri Lanka's deadliest violence since the civil war ended in 2009. But even survivors like Ganesan from Batticaloa — who lost his two-year-old daughter at Zion Church — express skepticism, drawing a clear line between genuine security needs and laws that "target the innocent or suppress human rights." The international leverage is real and immediate. The EU's Generalized Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+) grants Sri Lanka preferential market access contingent on human rights compliance. The UN has repeatedly urged Colombo to repeal the PTA, and the OHCHR has called for robust safeguards against torture, enforced disappearance, and coercive interrogation in any replacement. Failure to meet these conditions could trigger suspension of GSP+ preferences — a significant economic penalty for a country still recovering from its 2022 debt crisis. The bill's domestic legal trajectory is already contested. Speaker Jagath Wickramaratne flagged constitutional inconsistencies during a November 12 parliamentary debate. The Supreme Court has outlined required amendments before passage. Parliament has not scheduled a vote. Government spokesperson Nalinda Jayatissa insists civil liberties and press freedom are protected, but offers no structural mechanism to enforce that claim. The pattern is familiar across post-conflict states: a government elected on reform promises discovers that the security apparatus it inherited is too convenient to dismantle. The PTA's replacement reproduces its worst features — vague definitions, military policing, speech suppression — while adding a fresh coat of legislative paint. The question is whether the EU trade lever and Supreme Court pushback are strong enough to force real amendments, or whether Sri Lanka's reform moment has already passed.