By Kusum Wijetilleke
Sri Lanka and the European Union (EU) held the 27th Session of the EU-Sri Lanka Joint Commission in Colombo on Thursday (12). The EU commission delegation is led by European External Action Service (EEAS) Acting Managing Director for Asia and the Pacific Paola Pampaloni.
These joint meetings are used as the primary foreign relations exercise and engagement between the EU and its trade and investment partners. On the agenda will be a broad spectrum of issues that the EU considers crucial to enhancing cooperation, from governance and human rights to regional priorities.
Yet the most crucial aspect that will be discussed is Sri Lanka’s continued access to the EU’s single market through the Generalised System of Preferences Plus, commonly known as GSP+.
Sri Lanka exports around $ 2.5 billion of goods to the EU and around 60% of this trade occurs under GSP+ benefits, allowing for the tariff-free flow of Sri Lankan goods into the European market – a market that is particularly crucial for Sri Lanka’s garment sector and its agricultural exports.
Access under GSP+ is predicated on benchmarks related to human rights, governance, labour rights, and environmental protection and sustainability. For well over 15 years, successive Sri Lankan governments have committed to reforming the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which has been used to arrest, detain, and question individuals without due process, from lawyers, journalists, and poets to YouTubers and comedians.
In the post-war period, around 2012, the EU stripped Sri Lanka of GSP+ due to concerns over continued human rights violations. The ‘Yahapalana’ Government renegotiated Sri Lanka’s access to GSP+ in 2017, but this was conditioned on Sri Lanka making meaningful progress towards repealing or substantially reforming the PTA.
The PTA is persistently criticised because it programmes an emergency-style security state into ordinary law, while failing baseline requirements the United Nations (UN) system treats as non-negotiable in counterterrorism: legality (precision), necessity/proportionality, strict judicial control of detention, absolute torture-prohibition in practice, and fair trial guarantees.
The collision is not abstract, it is engineered by specific design choices that international human rights review bodies repeatedly treat as red flags. For example, executive detention architecture (arbitrary detention risk) is actually a core operational feature, enabling prolonged detention by executive orders and weak judicial interruption, producing extended deprivation of liberty without charge and creating ideal conditions for coercion and ‘confession-based’ prosecution.
The Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) review of the PTA and its attempted reforms frames it as enabling prolonged arbitrary detention and torture-linked confession extraction over decades. This structure is directly at odds with International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) rules that detention be promptly and effectively supervised by a judge with real power to order release, not merely to ‘visit’ or ‘review’ administratively controlled detention.
Another central international objection is the PTA’s practical reliance on confessions obtained in custody, in a context where torture allegations have been chronic and accountability scarce. HRW documents the PTA’s long record of torture-linked confessions and the failure of cosmetic amendments to remove the enabling conditions. International standards require exclusion of statements obtained by torture or ill-treatment and effective mechanisms to prevent coercion; a legal regime that predictably produces confession evidence from prolonged custody fails that test in design and effect.
The PTA also carried a vague and over-inclusive ‘terrorism’ logic which brings in not just legal issues but produces a so-called ‘chilling effect’ – generating reluctance among citizens to exercise their constitutionally protected civil rights.
Dissent or terror
A long-standing academic and civil society critique from those including prominent human rights experts, including Ambika Satkunanathan and Gehan Gunatilleke, is that Sri Lanka’s counterterrorism tradition uses broad, elastic definitions that can be redirected from genuine mass violence prevention to the regulation of dissent and minority political activism.
The ‘definition problem’ is treated by the UN counterterrorism/human rights mandate as a prerequisite: precision and legal certainty are not optional. Even where safeguards exist on paper (notification duties, welfare checks), Sri Lanka’s enforcement record is uneven; HRW notes that safeguards resembling “checks” often fail in implementation capacity and compliance.
The current National People’s Power (NPP) Government has circulated a draft intended to replace the PTA: the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill, published in December 2025. Civil society criticism is that the draft is structurally continuous with prior ‘replacement’ efforts (2018/2022/2023 lineage), reproducing the same governing logic with limited reframing.
A February 2026 joint communication by UN Special Procedures to the Sri Lankan Government concludes that the proposed Protection of the State from Terrorism Act does not remedy the core defects of the existing PTA.
While acknowledging the stated intent of reform and the inclusion of rights-affirming language in the preamble, the experts find that the draft legislation retains an over-broad and vague definition of terrorism that fails the legality and foreseeability requirements of international law. This definitional elasticity leaves the law structurally capable of being applied against dissent, civil society activity, and legitimate expression.
The communication further finds that the draft does not sufficiently prevent arbitrary detention, nor does it establish robust, enforceable judicial oversight capable of constraining Executive power in practice. Safeguards against torture, enforced disappearance, and coercive interrogation are treated declaratively rather than operationally, reproducing the same conditions that enabled abuse under the PTA.
Due process guarantees, such as access to counsel, fair trial rights, and proportional sentencing, remain inadequate, with particular concern expressed over mandatory penalties, expansive offences linked to proscribed organisations, and speech-related crimes defined poorly.
Judicial oversight is hollow: detention orders issued by the secretary of defence bypass any ‘necessity’ review, confidential extension reports undermine the rights of the accused and their legal defence, and magistrates lack genuine power to demand release. The bill also centralises expansive Executive authority: the president can proscribe organisations without time limits or transparent criteria, restriction orders can be imposed with minimal inquiry, and the attorney general can effectively impose conditions on prosecution for up to 20 years, diluting independent judicial scrutiny.
Overall, the proposed law expands Executive and security apparatus powers, undermines due process protections, normalises indefinite preventive detention, and fails to transform Sri Lanka’s counterterrorism framework into one anchored in the rule of law.
The overall assessment is that the proposed law preserves the PTA’s underlying architecture or broad criminalisation, preventive detention logic, and Executive discretion, while offering only cosmetic reform. In the view of the UN experts, as conveyed through the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights system, the draft therefore continues to fall short of Sri Lanka’s obligations under the ICCPR and international counterterrorism standards, entrenching rather than dismantling that permanent emergency framework within ordinary law.
Writing in January, Satkunanathan states: “The Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill (PSTB) presented by the Government of Sri Lanka for public comments in December 2025 is a carbon copy of the 2022 Anti-Terrorism Bill (ATB) produced by the Ranil Wickremesinghe Government, which was basically a carbon copy of a 2018 Counter-Terrorism Bill (CTB) proposed by the ‘Yahapalana’ Government.”
The bill’s definition of ‘terrorism’ includes overly broad intentions and conduct, such as “infringement of territorial integrity,” property damage, and other offences already covered under existing criminal law, creating a legal basis to construe peaceful civic advocacy or protest as terrorism.
The legislation legalises routine involvement of the armed forces in law enforcement, granting military personnel powers to arrest, search, and detain on “reasonable suspicion” without traditional criminal procedure constraints, embedding a permanent emergency posture and entrenching impunity in civilian policing structures.
A Sri Lankan Patriot Act
There is no universally accepted ‘gold standard’ in counterterrorism law; usually, the benchmark is how tightly certain extra-constitutional or exceptional powers are restricted by ordinary criminal procedure, judicial authorisation, independent oversight, and narrow definitions.
Canada, an advanced economy and member of the G7, embeds most counterterrorism enforcement within the Criminal Code framework and uses judge-supervised preventive tools with explicit thresholds and gatekeeping.
Canada also built expansive independent review capacity that reaches across national security activity, used as a legality check on counterterrorism operations. Similar to Sri Lanka’s PTA, ‘special powers’ exist, but crucially, they are more consistently routed through judicial authorisation and independent review rather than executive detention logic.
South Africa’s Protection of Constitutional Democracy Against Terrorist and Related Activities Act (2004) is frequently cited for being developed after lengthy consultations and for seeking to keep terrorism cases within criminal procedure safeguards.
A UN Special Rapporteur report on South Africa commends the consultative process and the effort to ensure human rights protections and criminal procedure safeguards apply to terrorism investigations and prosecutions. The act’s architecture is presented as conventional criminalisation plus procedural safeguards rather than a detention-first administrative regime.
Kenya’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (2012) provides a statutory terrorism framework and includes at least a limited exemption for exercise of certain fundamental rights, even while the definition remains broad and contested. Thus, even a Low- and Middle-Income Country (LMIC) like Kenya, with a history of violent terrorism, has ingrained certain rights exemption logic, retaining terrorism handling within ordinary judicial pathways rather than executive governance instruments.
Sri Lanka’s PTA is indicative of a deliberate choice of a governance model by the State: broad definitional reach, detention time as an instrument, and Executive administrative controls that can be redirected across ethnic politics, civil society, and dissent.
A society that respects basic civil liberties must be a given, and must sustain itself especially during times of turmoil and upheaval; this is the true test of laws and of institutions. The current Sri Lankan draft bill fails that structural test even where it gestures towards reform. The other inescapable fact is that anti-terrorism legislation has seldom resulted in the actual prevention of terrorism; if anything, laws similar to the PTA are utilised in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, making them perhaps even more redundant.
Perhaps most central to the reform process is the nuance required to define terrorism or any related criminal activity precisely and narrowly, and this is particularly important because governments from India to Malaysia and the Philippines, and now even advanced countries such as the US, have used counterterrorism laws to detain those allegedly involved in drug trafficking or vice versa: using anti-narcotics legislation to make seemingly arbitrary arrests.
Satkunanathan states: “Sri Lanka does not need another anti-terror law. The Suppression of Terrorist Bombings Act, Prevention of Hostage Taking Act, Convention on the Suppression of Terrorist Financing Act, Offences Against Aircraft Act, and several other laws criminalise ‘terrorist’ activities as required by a 2004 United Nations Security Council Resolution (1566): a resolution that necessitates member states to have laws in place to counter ‘terrorism.’ Activists, human rights organisations, and the current President himself before being elected argued that Sri Lanka needs to repeal the current draconian, and often misused, Prevention of Terrorism Act.”
That would be yet another central promise, and premise, of the NPP manifesto that the President’s administration has reneged on. Sooner or later, the Government will pay an immense political price, and it might lose access to GSP+.
Thus, the Government must either meet previous commitments, or make new commitments; more window dressing through rushed legislation that neither enhances security, repairs Sri Lanka’s image, nor satisfies the EU GSP+ regime would be a waste of everybody’s time and will guarantee further economic headwinds.
(The writer is a political commentator, media presenter, and foreign affairs analyst. He serves as Adviser on Political Economy to the Leader of the Opposition and is a member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya [SJB]. A former banker, he spent 11 years in the industry in Colombo and Dubai, including nine years in corporate finance, working with some of Sri Lanka’s largest corporates on project finance, trade facilities, and working capital. He holds a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Colombo and a Bachelor’s in Accounting and Finance from the University of Kent [UK]. He can be contacted via email: [email protected] and X: @kusumw)
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication.
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