Sunday Times 2
Bimba Jayasinghe Tillekeratne appointed Solicitor General
View(s):Mrs. Bimba Jayasinghe Tillekeratne, President’s Counsel has been appointed as the Solicitor General of Sri Lanka with effect from October 23, 2014.
She was called to the Bar in 1981, joined the Attorney General’s Department in 1983 and was appointed successively as State Counsel, Senior State Counsel, Deputy Solicitor General, Additional Solicitor General and Senior Solicitor General. She was appointed President’s Counsel in July 2011.
She has experience in both criminal and civil divisions of the department and has handled many important cases on behalf of the State, particularly in the areas of Environmental Law and fundamental rights. She is the first ever Senior Additional Solicitor General of the Attorney General’s Department and presently heads the civil division of the department. She has trained many juniors in the legal profession and is a member of the Board of Studies of the Sri Lanka Law College since 2006.
She has represented Sri Lanka at many international fora and is the first female officer of the Attorney General’s Department to appear for the Government of Sri Lanka before the Human Rights Committee in Geneva Switzerland, as head of the legal team that represented Sri Lanka at the 112th Session of the ICCPR, in October 2014 when the fifth Periodic Report submitted by Sri Lanka under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was reviewed. She was appointed Acting Attorney General in May this year in the absence of the then Attorney General who was overseas at that time.
She is a law graduate of the University of Colombo and did her post-graduate studies in International law from the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, Netherlands. She was the recipient of a fellowship from the government of Netherlands and a training award from Colombo Plan.
She is an old girl of St. Paul’s Girls’ Convent, Kelaniya and St. Bridget’s Convent, Colombo 7.
Married to Anura Tillekeratne, she is the mother of three children, all in the medical field. She is the only daughter of late Mr. and Mrs. Justin Wilfred Jayasinghe of Kelaniya.