By M. C. Rasmin –

The Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill (PSTA) is better drafted than the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) it is meant to replace. But a better-drafted law is not the same as a better law, and the bill has set off one of the loudest public debates of this government’s term. Lawyers, journalists, trade unions, minority groups, the UN and international rights organisations have all raised objections. Yet much of that dissent is not reaching ordinary people. Our media is fragmented along language, ownership and party lines, and serious discussion of the bill is scattered across English-language commentary, social media threads and court petitions. Most citizens have heard that a new terrorism law is coming. Few know what it actually says.

A promise of something different

That matters, because this government came to power promising something different. The National People’s Power’s 2024 election manifesto, A Thriving Nation, A Beautiful Life, pledged on page 129 of its English version the “abolition of all oppressive acts including the PTA and ensuring civil rights of people in all parts of the country”. Addressing the opening of the new Parliament on 21 November 2024, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said the government aimed to build a state where law, justice and fairness prevail. And in a social media post on 22 October, NPP MP Chathuranga Abeysinghe wrote that the government was trying to create a “progressive society” in the face of what he called “the so-called opposition”.

It is a fair question to put back to him. Can a society be progressive when people can be labelled terrorists for speaking, writing, publishing or protesting? The PSTA is not arriving alone. In September, Cabinet approved an Anti-Organised Crime Bill for presentation to Parliament. A new Non-Governmental Organisations (Registration and Supervision) Bill, still unpublished, would require any group of five or more people to register, allow officials to enter premises without a warrant, and expect organisations to align with government policy. On 28 September, UN Special Rapporteurs wrote to the government warning that it conflicts with freedom of association. Police powers, a growing role for the military, magistrates reduced to signing orders and broad definitions of terrorism are strange building blocks for a progressive society. They look more like the world of Kafka’s The Trial, where a man is arrested and prosecuted without ever learning what he is accused of.

The party’s senior members know this ground well. In August 2022, days after student leaders including Inter University Students’ Federation convener Wasantha Mudalige were detained under the PTA following the first protest after the state of emergency lapsed, NPP General Secretary Tilvin Silva told a news conference that they were being held without being produced in court because there was no evidence against them. He called the Act anti-democratic and anti-human and demanded its immediate repeal. A year later, when the previous government gazetted the Anti-Terrorism Bill on 15 September 2023, NPP parliamentarians including Vijitha Herath and PM Harini Amarasuriya filed petitions in the Supreme Court challenging it. The Court closed those cases on 19 October 2023 only because the bill had not yet been placed before Parliament. The objections they raised then, about detention without judicial oversight, executive power and vague offences, are the same ones now being raised against their own bill.
Online freedom is already under threat

The PSTA also lands on a country where freedom online is already shrinking. The Online Safety Act was pushed through Parliament on 24 January 2024 despite protests from journalists, the opposition, the tech industry and the UN. It created offences such as communicating “false statements”, left it to a five-member commission appointed by the President to decide what is false, and allowed complaints to go straight to magistrates’ courts. The NPP criticised the Act in opposition. In April 2025, the Public Security Minister said the government would decide “soon” on amending it and did not plan to appoint the commission for now. Meanwhile, private complaints under the Act continue to be filed in magistrates’ courts, and people still do not know where the line lies between criticism and crime online. That is the reason the Online Safety Act is the right reference point for judging the PSTA. A citizen who posts, shares or comments online is already working under one vague law. The PSTA would add a second, far harsher one on top of it.

Forty-seven years of lessons

The PTA was passed in 1979 as a “temporary” law. It is still in force 47 years later, seventeen years after the war it was written for ended. Its record suggests it served governments far better than it served the people.

No government has ever published a full count of how many people were arrested under it. The figures we have come in fragments. In November 2011, the government told Parliament that 893 people were held under the PTA and only 64 were on trial. In 2017, official figures given to the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism showed that of 81 PTA prisoners awaiting trial, 70 had been held for more than five years and 12 for more than ten. The Human Rights Commission found one person had spent fifteen years in custody without even being indicted. Its national study of prisons in 2020 found that 84 per cent of male PTA prisoners said they were tortured after arrest, and 90 per cent of those said they were then made to sign confessions.

The targets kept changing. First it was Tamil youth in the North and East. After the Easter Sunday attacks of 2019, more than 600 people, mostly Muslims, were arrested in three years. Then came the poet Ahnaf Jazeem, held for about 19 months over a book of Tamil poems, student activists after the Aragalaya, and Tamils who gathered to remember their war dead. Sri Lanka promised in 2017 to repeal the Act to regain EU trade concessions. A 2022 amendment cut maximum detention from 18 to 12 months but left the core untouched.

The PTA is still being used today. In March 2025, a man was held under it over a pro-Palestine sticker and released after about two weeks. In June 2026, the rapper Sangeethan Ganeshkumar was detained over a music video. That record is the test any replacement has to pass. The first PSTA draft, published in December 2025, was criticised by Amnesty, the UN human rights office and seven UN experts. A revised bill was gazetted on 22 September 2026 and presented to Parliament on 6 October. On 20 October, the Supreme Court began hearing 25 petitions against it, including one from the Free Media Movement.

What counts as terrorism

With that history in mind, let us look at the PSTA itself. Everything in the bill depends on how it defines terrorism, because every other offence hangs on that definition. Section 3 says an act is terrorism if it is done for a certain purpose and has a certain result. The government says this two-part test is close to the model recommended by the UN. The trouble lies in the purposes and results it lists.

One purpose is to “unduly” compel the Government of Sri Lanka, any other government or an international organisation to do or not do something. In plain terms, almost every strike, boycott or mass protest is an attempt to pressure a government into doing something. One of the listed results is “substantial economic loss”. A port strike causes economic loss. So does a farmers’ blockade. Neither phrase is defined.

International experts have said this clearly. Amnesty International notes that despite repeated revisions, each Sri Lankan government has stuck to “the same overly broad approach” to defining terrorism. The UN human rights office says the bill “reproduces and expands” the PTA’s deficiencies, and that its definition reaches minor harms such as “hurt” and “damage” that fall well short of terrorism under international standards. It also points out that most of the acts listed, from robbery to damaging property, are already crimes under the Penal Code and other laws. The World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) warns of a serious risk of abuse against political opponents, minority communities, journalists and dissenting voices.

The bill does say that taking part in a protest, strike or act of dissent is not, by itself, enough to show terrorist intent. That sounds reassuring until you read it closely. “By itself” means it can still count when combined with something else: a slogan, a placard, a post, a road blocked for an afternoon. As the UN office and Amnesty both point out, this is a caution, not a guarantee.

The freedom to speak, gather and organise

On speech, the bill is a real improvement on paper. Under the PTA, section 2(1)(h) made it a crime to cause, by words, “communal disharmony”. That test had nothing to do with violence. A person did not need to call for anyone to be hurt; they only needed to say something the authorities believed could upset relations between communities. It was the section used to hold Ahnaf Jazeem. The PSTA drops it. The state must now show that a person meant to encourage terrorism, or knew their words would, and that there was a real risk someone would act on them. The bill also says in so many words that journalism, academic research, satire, human rights work and protest are protected, and it adds a public-interest defence. If the bill stopped there, it would be a clear step forward. It does not. The rest of the bill reaches well beyond the internet, into the newsroom, the street, the community hall and the place of worship.

The press. Section 74 treats any information about the police or armed forces carrying out official duties as confidential, with no test of whether it is actually secret or whether sharing it causes harm. A reporter’s photograph of a checkpoint, a raid or an arrest could fall inside it. The public-interest defence helps, but it is first weighed by a police officer at the moment of arrest.
The street. Under section 51, a police officer can ban a gathering or cordon off an area, with a court approving it only within 24 hours, by which time a protest is over. Disobeying the order becomes an offence under a terrorism law. Combined with a definition that covers pressure on the government and economic loss, this brings ordinary protest, strikes and trade union action within reach of terrorism charges.

Organisations. The President can ban organisations with no time limit and no independent review. Once a group is banned, publishing anything “in furtherance of” its aims is prohibited, the speech protections do not apply, and even campaigning to have the ban lifted is an offence. Bans made under the PTA, including those on Tamil diaspora groups, carry over automatically. Read alongside the NGO Bill, this gives the state two separate routes to shut down or control civil society groups.

Neighbours and communities. Section 15 makes it a crime, with up to seven years in prison, to fail to report information about terrorism. In communities already watched by the state, this can turn relatives, neighbours, teachers and religious leaders into compelled informants. The exception for “professional secrecy” is undefined, and the person relying on it has to prove it.
Memory and belief. Since the war ended, people in the North and East have been questioned or detained for commemorating their dead. With PTA-era bans rolled over and a broad offence of encouraging terrorism, the bill does not clearly protect remembrance or religious gatherings.
Online, and abroad. Section 10 makes it an offence to share a publication “useful” to someone preparing a terrorist act, with no limit on what “useful” means; a map, a forwarded PDF or a link could qualify. Anyone providing a service that lets others obtain such material commits an offence, and company directors are presumed guilty unless they prove otherwise. The duty to report can reach the admin of a WhatsApp group. And the bill applies to Sri Lankan citizens anywhere in the world, including dual citizens. A Sri Lankan in Toronto or London who posts about a banned group could be prosecuted when they come home.

Your phone and your privacy

On privacy, the revised bill is better than the first draft, but weaker than it looks.
Messages are safer than before. The December 2025 draft would have let magistrates order messaging and encryption providers to “unlock or unencrypt” private messages, and let police demand data from telecom and internet companies. Both powers were dropped after UN experts objected. That is a real win, and the government deserves credit for it.

Your phone can still be taken without a warrant. Police, soldiers and coast guard officers can seize any “document, thing or article” on reasonable suspicion (section 20). In practice that means phones and laptops, which today hold a person’s whole life.

The hours in military custody are the weakest point. The armed forces can hold a person for up to 24 hours before handing them to the police, and the OMCT notes that travel time is not counted, with no limit set. Only then does the 48-hour clock start for bringing them before a magistrate. Police interviews must be video-recorded, but questioning by soldiers does not have to be, and nothing stops a soldier demanding a passcode or forcing a fingerprint unlock.
Your name can stay on a list for ever. A new central database will record every arrest, remand, bail, acquittal and conviction. That helps stop disappearances. But the bill does not say who can see the records, how long they are kept, or whether they are deleted when someone is cleared, and the data protection law’s rights to see, correct and erase records are not yet in force.

Who watches the detainee

This is where the bill makes its most genuine improvements. Under the PTA, a person could be held for months with no independent person checking on them. The PSTA lets magistrates turn up at any detention site without warning, see the detainee, order a medical examination if they suspect torture, and have the person moved. Police interviews must be recorded. The Human Rights Commission must be told of every arrest within 48 hours. Most important, confessions made to the police can no longer be used as evidence. Under the PTA, torture happened most in the weeks after arrest because a signed confession could win a conviction. Remove its value in court, and much of the reason to extract it disappears.

Two warnings apply. Offences committed before the new law starts will still be prosecuted under the PTA, so old confessions can still be used. And these safeguards depend on magistrates using them; the OMCT points out that magistrates tend to rely heavily on what police and prosecutors tell them, especially in terrorism cases.

Safety, and safety from the state

Sri Lanka does need a working counter-terrorism law. The 2019 Easter Sunday bombings killed more than 250 people, and the PTA never even defined terrorism. The government says the PSTA fixes this with a modern framework drafted by an expert committee and cleared by the Attorney General, and that anyone with concerns can go to the Supreme Court. That deserves a fair hearing.

But safety also means safety from the state. A Defence Ministry official, not a court, decides who is detained, for up to two months at a time and up to a year in total. Add remand, and a person can spend up to two years in custody before being charged. The review committee is appointed by the Defence Minister and can only make recommendations. The Attorney General can also defer a prosecution for up to 20 years on conditions such as “rehabilitation” or a public apology. The suspect must agree, but someone facing two years in custody has every reason to accept almost anything to get out. The OMCT warns this may amount to punishment without conviction.

What the world teaches

Many democracies have terrorism laws, but the lesson from abroad is not reassuring. The United States passed the Patriot Act weeks after 9/11, and a generation later many of its surveillance powers are still in place. In India, official crime data analysed by FactChecker shows that 10,552 people were arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act between 2014 and 2020, and only 253 were convicted. In Britain, the 2025 ban on a direct-action protest group led to hundreds of arrests of people holding placards in support of it. The UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism has repeatedly warned that such laws are increasingly turned against civil society, journalists and human rights defenders. Broad terrorism laws have rarely been the mark of a progressive government, and they tend to outlast the people who wrote them. A government that wants to stand apart from that trend should do the opposite: narrow its laws, not widen them.

How much has really changed?

The changes are real but uneven. In the courtroom they are significant. On who holds power, very little has changed: the executive still decides who is detained, the military still arrests, and the President still bans organisations. For someone who is arrested, the PSTA is safer than the PTA. For someone who reports, protests, organises, worships, commemorates or posts, it is not clearly safer, and for a Sri Lankan abroad it may be riskier.

What would close the gaps

Most of the fixes are small changes to the text, many already proposed by the UN human rights office, Amnesty, the OMCT and Sri Lankan civil society. Parliament should remove “unduly compelling a government” from the definition, limit terrorism to violent acts that put lives at risk, and make protest, strikes and dissent a clear exclusion rather than a caution. A court, not the Defence Ministry, should approve every detention, and every arrested person should be brought before a judge within 24 hours, whoever made the arrest. Police and soldiers should need a warrant to seize or search a phone. Bans on organisations should have time limits and court review, and the speech protections should apply to them. Information should count as confidential only if sharing it causes real harm, and journalists and clergy should be named in the exceptions to the duty to report. The database needs rules on access and deletion. The government should stop using the PTA now and review every case still held under it.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the 25 petitions is the next point where any of this can change. After that, it is up to Parliament. A government that promised a progressive society, and whose own members once fought these same powers in court, should not need to be reminded what 47 years of the PTA taught this country.