By Panduka Keerthinanda, Attorney at Law
Colombo, Oct. 15 (Daily Mirror) - When the National People’s Power (NPP) government swept into office in 2024, it carried a mandate that many Sri Lankans had waited decades to see fulfilled: the abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), a law that had haunted the island’s political landscape since 1979. The government’s manifesto promised to dismantle all oppressive legislation, and for a brief moment, it seemed the long era of executive detention and warrantless arrests might finally end.
Two years later, that promise has taken a troubling form. The Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill (PSTB), gazetted on 22 September 2026 and presented to Parliament on 6 October, formally repeals the PTA. But legal experts, human rights organisations, and civil society groups warn that the new bill is not abolition. It is rebranding.
“This is not the end of an old cage. It is the same cage with a new name.”
The Defence Secretary’s Detention Orders
At the heart of these concerns is a single, sweeping provision: the power granted to the Secretary to the Ministry of Defence to issue detention orders. Under the proposed law, the Defence Secretary a political appointee may order a person held for up to two months at a time, with renewals extending detention to a full year.
A magistrate is required to be notified. But crucially, the magistrate cannot overturn the order. They are expected to approve it, not to independently assess whether the evidence justifies continued custody.
Magistrates Reduced to Rubber Stamps
In effect, the judiciary is reduced to a rubber stamp while the executive decides who stays locked up and for how long. This is not a theoretical concern. The Defence Secretary is not an independent judicial officer; he is a political figure appointed by the President.Therefore the law enforcement will be politicized by the new legislation.
Political Policing by Political Appointment
The danger is not merely structural. It is political. When a political appointee holds the power to detain, and when courts cannot meaningfully review that power, law enforcement becomes vulnerable to politicisation.
An Elastic Definition of Terrorism
The bill’s definitions remain dangerously broad. The exclusion of protesters from the definition of terrorism is hollow if the definition itself remains wide enough to capture political dissent, strikes, or mass protests under phrases like “unduly compel a government.” Even lobbying the government to amend an IMF agreement could, under such language, be construed as a crime.
Military and Coast Guard Given Police Powers
The bill also grants sweeping new powers to the military and Coast Guard, allowing them to exercise police functions arrest, search, and detention without clear lines of command or accountability. This blurring of military and policing roles carries obvious risks for a country with Sri Lanka’s history.
Presidential Proscription and Curfew
The President retains the power to proscribe organisations and impose curfews with minimal judicial scrutiny. These are extraordinary powers, and the bill does little to subject them to meaningful judicial oversight.
An “Independent” Review Committee That Is Not Independent
The “Independent” Review Committee that is meant to oversee detentions only advises the Minister who appoints it. That structure offers little genuine independence. A body that advises the appointer is not a check on power; it is an extension of it.
The international community has echoed these alarms. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in its February 2026 submission, warned that the draft bill “reproduces and expands deficiencies previously identified in the PTA,” creating risks of “arbitrary arrest and prolonged detention without effective judicial oversight.”
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists have all raised similar concerns. The ICJ noted specifically that people may be detained for two months “solely on order of the secretary of the Defence Ministry,” a provision that “undercuts the inherent authority of the judiciary” and contravenes Article 13 of Sri Lanka’s Constitution and Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), a leading Colombo-based legal think tank, has called on the government to withdraw the bill entirely. In its October 2026 statement, the CPA argued that the PSTB “perpetuates the same fundamental flaws of the PTA, albeit with some procedural safeguards added,” and that “executive detention is completely inconsistent” with constitutional guarantees.
The CPA’s central point is difficult to refute: merely being better than the PTA does not make the new bill consistent with Sri Lanka’s international obligations or its own constitution.
The PTA’s History and Human Cost
What makes these warnings particularly poignant is the history they invoke. The PTA was introduced in July 1979 as a temporary measure meant to last three years. It was certified urgent, giving the Supreme Court only hours for review, and passed Parliament in a single day.
A minister could order detention for 18 months. Confessions made to police became admissible as evidence. Failing to report a “terrorist” became a crime yet the Act never defined who a terrorist was. In 1982, it was made permanent, again as an urgent bill. It has now been in force for 47 years.
The human cost of that law is staggering. By 1990, approximately 6,700 suspected JVP members were being held under emergency and anti-terrorism laws. The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka found that more than half of PTA detainees remained in custody between five and fifteen years without their cases being concluded. Between 2019 and 2022, more than 600 people were arrested under the PTA.
Among those detained were journalist J. S. Tissanayagam, poet Ahnaf Jazeem, lawyer Hejaaz Hizbullah, and student leader Wasantha Mudalige all of whom experienced lengthy detention or prosecution before eventual release or acquittal.
Modest Improvements But the Core Defect Remains
The bill does contain some improvements. It removes the PTA’s provision allowing confessions made to police officers to be admitted as evidence. It recognises access to counsel and requires that detainees be produced before a magistrate every 14 days. It includes a clause excluding protesters, advocates, and trade unionists from the definition of terrorism.
These are real, if modest, steps forward. But they miss the central defect. As Ground views observed, “The executive still decides who is locked up and for how long and no court can effectively say no. A visit is not control.”
The magistrate’s ability to visit a detention facility is meaningless if the magistrate cannot order the detainee’s release. The exclusion of protesters from the definition of terrorism is hollow if the definition itself remains broad enough to capture political dissent, strikes, or mass protests under phrases like “unduly compel a government.”
For a country that has endured nearly five decades of emergency rule, the stakes could not be higher. The PTA was never just a law; it was a system a machinery of fear that normalised torture, enforced disappearance, and the silencing of dissent. To replace it with a bill that preserves its most dangerous features is not reform. It is continuity.
The current government knows this history intimately. Many of its members were themselves targets of PTA powers when they were in opposition. Yet the bill they have produced retains the core architecture of the law they once denounced. The NPP’s own election manifesto pledged the abolition of “all oppressive acts including the Prevention of Terrorism Act.” The PSTB does not deliver that abolition; it delivers a successor.
The Sri Lankan government has repeatedly assured the international community, including the European Union and the United Nations, that the new law would meet international human rights standards. Those assurances were tied to trade concessions like GSP+ and to Sri Lanka’s standing as a member of the Human Rights Council. The PSTB, as currently drafted, does not meet those standards. It fails the tests of legality, necessity, proportionality, and non-discrimination that any counter-terrorism law must satisfy.
The government promised to abolish the PTA. It should keep that promise not by renaming the cage, but by opening it.
The bill is expected to be debated in the coming weeks. Will Sri Lanka finally close the door on a dark chapter, or will it simply turn the page and begin the same story again?