By Lionel Bopage –

Sri Lanka’s reformers and their critics often describe the same legislation in opposite terms. For the government, the new bills mark a break with the past. For many who lived through the eighties, the nineties and the long conflicts that followed, they look like a familiar toolkit being reassembled under a new name.

The argument is about text. Almost everyone agrees that the Prevention of Terrorism Act should go. The dispute is whether its replacements will keep its machinery. Broad definitions, executive detention, restricted bail and, in one bill, police confessions that courts can admit, all appear in new language. A perceptive critic would say that the state can confront real terrorism and organised crime without any of them.

The bills and what they carry forward

The Protection of the State from Terrorism bill is meant to replace the PTA. Human Rights Watch has described its overbroad definition of terrorism, its weak judicial oversight and its sweeping powers of search and arrest as concerning. Amnesty International has raised similar concerns and has called for the PTA to be repealed, with a moratorium on its use in the meantime. Not every commentator reads the draft the same way. One columnist credited the latest version with narrowing of executive powers and called that a positive step, while arguing that the protections for protest and industrial action still leave too much to litigation.

The organised crime bill raises its own problems. Its definitions reach well beyond organised criminal groups. The critics’ concern is what the police can do on the basis of appearance and association, and how confessions made to senior officers can be admissible in court.

The promise and the gap

On 7 November 2026, the President told a trade union conference that the government would not advance the terrorism bill or the organised crime bill until public concerns had been heard. The government has not published a timetable or format for those consultations. The one specific amendment reported so far concerns the organised crime bill, cutting detention from 72 to 48 hours. How it would curtail the excesses is an unanswered question. Nothing has been announced on the terrorism bill’s text. Consultation should have come before the bills were gazetted, not after.

A pause is a decision, and it matters. But a pause is not an amendment. The bills remain in the form that critics have contested, and the consultation that the government promises may end with those bills largely intact. Some ministers have also said they want the new laws to be passed, and the timing of consultations and any redrafting remains unclear.

There have been new developments since the pause. On 9 November, the Solicitor General told the Supreme Court that the government will remove the provisions on tattoos and body marks through amendments at the Committee Stage and will withdraw the requirement for prior court approval before publishing information on serious-crime cases. It has also proposed removing Excise Ordinance offences, amending copyright offences, and is still considering changes to detention orders and the Bail Act. The amendment text was given to the Court and the petitioners’ lawyers, but its publication has not been reported. Separately, the Supreme Court’s determinations on the Protection of the State from Terrorism bill and two other bills reached the Speaker’s office on 11 November, and their contents have not been made public. The reports so far do not address the confession rule or the presumptions drawn from hairstyles, clothing, and association.

Why the memory matters

Government messaging can be hard to tell apart from the concerns it raises among the public. Some speeches have called for more than one term to deliver promises, have described working people’s opponents as trying to undo real achievements, and have pointed to hostile forces at work. These views may be sincerely held. At the same time, the new bills would extend state powers over arrest, detention, speech, and organising, and many citizens reasonably read this as a government that expects resistance and is preparing for it. The government carries a real responsibility, and its good intentions are not in question. Transparency, accountability, and open engagement with the public would go a long way toward easing these concerns. The hope is that these powers are never left in a form that a future government could use to silence the progressive, justice-minded citizens who hold it into account.

That reading is not paranoid in a country with Sri Lanka’s record. The decades from the seventies onward brought disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture and abuses by security forces, insurgents, and state-backed groups. Some leaders have acknowledged responsibility for particular episodes. Many others have not. Some have never been held to account. For many incidents no one has taken responsibility at all. A government that inherits this history and then adopts laws with broad definitions of threat must expect its citizens to connect the dots.

The argument of those who fear preparation for backlash runs as follows: Governments do not usually draft emergency-style powers for a stable environment. When the state prepares laws for preventive detention, tighter control of NGO funding and restricted organising, the question is who those laws are meant to reach. Experienced and older cadres within the broader political movement have themselves experienced coercive state machinery under earlier governments. For them, the continuity is personal, and that makes their suspicion of the new laws more than theoretical. That is a serious argument, and it should be stated plainly rather than dismissed. Those who lived through the PTA years, and who now hold influence in the government, are well placed to say whether the new laws would have changed what happened to them. Their voices would carry weight in the debate.

Assurances and their limits

The government’s best answer is that the laws will be applied fairly and that the pause shows it is listening. Those are not trivial points. But the law is applied not by the minister who drafted it but by the officer on the ground, who reads a clause as he or she understands it. The people most exposed are the poor, those living outside Colombo and those without access to a lawyer. And laws outlast the governments that write them. Powers granted today will pass to whoever holds office tomorrow.

For that reason, the only durable assurance is a law whose text itself prevents misuse. Several specific changes would accomplish this without weakening the state’s capacity to act against genuine terrorism or organised crime.

On definitions, the terrorism bill should be aligned with UN human rights benchmarks and should expressly exclude political dissent, advocacy, peaceful protest, industrial action, and independent journalism. A bare statement that such acts are not, by themselves, enough to infer terrorism is much weaker than an exclusion. The organised crime bill should drop any presumption of membership drawn from hairstyles, tattoos, clothing, hand signs, or loose associations. Even a rebuttable presumption would let police bring a person before a magistrate who would then be bound to remand them. Its schedule of offences should also be narrowed, since it currently reaches conduct such as bigamy, copyright infringement, and unlicensed gambling. Extraordinary powers belong to genuinely organised serious crime. Foreign models were drafted for other legal systems, and their transplant here needs close scrutiny.

On judicial control, executive detention orders of up to a year should be removed from both bills. Arrest, remand and detention should rest with the courts. Surveillance, location tracking, and compelled unlocking of digital devices should require a judicial warrant. Magistrates should regain discretion over bail, rather than being compelled to remand a suspect or being confined to the High Court.

On due process, the organised crime bill’s provisions making statements to senior police officers admissible in evidence should be removed. The terrorism bill has rightly dropped the equivalent PTA rule, and it should not return through another statute. History shows such rules encourage coercion and torture. Suspects should have confidential access to a lawyer from first contact, including during questioning. Hearsay from dead or untraceable persons should not be admitted without cross-examination. Reports indicate that at least twelve people were arrested under the PTA between September 2024 and May 2025, after the NPP had pledged to abolish it, and that further arrests have followed. Those figures are the reason the text matters.

On process, the bills should be withdrawn temporarily for revision, as the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka and many civil society groups have urged. The drafting record should be published, including the expert committee’s draft of the organised crime bill and the responses to the 2025 consultation on the terrorism bill, with an explanation of any departures from them. The organised crime bill should also be confined to what the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime actually requires. That convention does not demand executive detention, admissible police confessions or presumptions of membership based on appearance.

Fair counterarguments

A fair account must give the government its strongest case. Sri Lanka has long needed to replace the PTA, and it faces real threats from organised crime and drug-funded networks. The government’s supporters argue that the latest PSTA draft is narrower than earlier versions, that a pause shows willingness to listen, and that some of the criticism comes from people who opposed reform from the start. They say that dismantling a repressive legal order takes time, and that consultation with critics is the right goal even when it is slow.

Those points deserve to be taken seriously. They also strengthen the case for putting changes into the text now. If the government is confident its bills are narrow enough, it should be willing to publish the drafting record and accept the amendments that critics are asking for.

The claims about a deliberate plan to suppress a future backlash, and about foreign powers fermenting and/or waiting for unrest, remain inferences rather than established facts. Leverage from lenders and trade partners is real and publicly debated, but it does not prove a plot. The stronger and more defensible argument is about what the texts allow, and about the historical precedent of how earlier laws were used.

The NGO and labour bills

The NGO draft has been criticised for an overly broad scope that extends to informal community groups and for creating a new competent authority alongside the existing NGO Secretariat. One commentary argued that the government is recycling the law drafted by the Ministry of Public Security under the previous administration. Reform-minded voices have warned that the draft could alienate organisations that broadly support the government’s agenda, and NGO representatives have asked for it to be revised in consultation with civil society. The government’s case is that the law responds to international anti-money-laundering standards. Those standards are real, but they call for a risk-based approach. A law that regulates everything from community groups to corporate philanthropy is not obviously fit for purpose.

Labour reform raises a related question about sequence. Amnesty International and other groups urged the government to halt the process until workers, and their representatives were properly consulted, and the Labour Deputy Minister has since said the reforms aim to strengthen workers’ rights. Consultation with unions should come before the text, not after it. The government’s goal of a modern labour framework that meets international standards is worth supporting. But the test is whether the final law preserves the protections workers already have, and that cannot be known until the text exists.

Conclusion

Connecting the dots is not unreasonable in a country that has lived through what Sri Lanka has lived through. But the dots are most convincing when they are drawn from the historical and political record rather than from rumours. The clauses on definitions, detention, bail, and confessions are visible and can be debated line by line. So are the consultation records and the history of drafting.

The government has paused the terrorism and organised crime bills, and that is a start. A pause is not a repeal, and an assurance is not a law. The test for Parliament is whether it will insist on changes to the text before it votes, and whether the government will show, in law and in action, that it does not intend to rebuild the machinery of the past.