Heightened crackdown on dissent: HRW

The Sri Lankan government is using emergency regulations to harass and arbitrarily detain activists seeking political reform and accountability for the country’s economic crisis, Human Rights Watch said today. Since Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as president on July 21, 2022, the police and military have sought to curtail protests through the intimidation, surveillance, and arbitrary arrests of demonstrators, civil society activists, lawyers, and journalists.

Anti-government protests in Colombo and elsewhere in the country led then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country before resigning on July 15. On July 22, President Wickremesinghe ordered security forces to disperse protesters and break up their main site in central Colombo. The police have subsequently targeted perceived protest leaders for arrest and detention.

“The Sri Lankan government’s crackdown on peaceful dissent appears to be a misguided and unlawful attempt to divert attention from the need to address the country’s urgent economic crisis,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Sri Lanka’s international partners should be clear that they need to be working with a rights-respecting administration to address Sri Lanka’s deeply rooted economic problems.”

Security forces injured more than 50 people in the July 22 early morning raid on the main janatha aragalaya (people’s struggle) site in Colombo. Security forces assaulted and beat three journalists from Xposure News – Chaturanga Pradeep Kumara, Rasika Gunawardana, and Shabeer Mohammed – and at least one other journalist, Jareen Samuel of the BBC, during the raid. Wickremesinghe berated foreign diplomats for criticizing the security forces’ use of excessive force and took no action to hold those responsible to account.

A number of Buddhist monks and Christian clergy had joined the protests. The media reported that the Colombo Magistrates’ Court on July 25 had issued a travel ban on Father Jeewantha Peiris, a Catholic priest who had been prominent in the protests, and several others. Two days later police visited Father Peiris’s church and said that they had orders to arrest him. In a July 31 statement, 1,640 members of the Catholic clergy condemned targeting the priest, saying that they had all backed the protests.

On July 26, the authorities arrested another prominent protester, Dhaniz Ali, from an international flight about to depart from Colombo. On July 27, unidentified men in civilian clothes abducted Veranga Pushpika, a former student activist and journalist who had also been active in the protests, from a bus in Colombo. Police did not disclose his whereabouts to lawyers or the Human Rights Commission for several hours before acknowledging his arrest.

Human rights defenders said that the police sought to obstruct defense lawyers from meeting with four protesters who had been arrested after they handed over to the police a large sum of money taken from the president’s official residence after protesters had occupied it, according to HRW. 

Lawyers and media organizations told Human Rights Watch that they have experienced increased intimidation, including threats of violence and surveillance. In one episode, a group of men claiming to be police officers, but not wearing uniform, visited the office of an online publication, Xposure News, on July 27 and demanded that a security guard identify people shown in photographs and show them CCTV footage.