Criminalising Dissent: Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act and Its Use in Suppressing Social Movements - 2022

Abstract

After its independence in 1948 from the colonial rulers, Sri Lanka witnessed the worst economic crisis and political instability in the country. As a response to the persistent pressures of the economic crisis, mass protests broke out all over the country in March, 2022. Consequent to the mass demand, president Gotabhaya Rajapaksha and the regime had to resign, and Ranil Wickramasinghe became the new president. Initially, the political regime in power used military forces to suppress these protests and the current president has been using the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) alongside the armed forces and the police to control social movements. Activists who led the protests have been arrested under PTA without trial. Hence, the objectives of this study were to examine how the authoritative regime uses the PTA to criminalise dissent and how it discourages the social movement in 2022, and how the act violated the fundamental rights of the activists. This is a qualitative study and the primary and secondary data has been collected from national and international reports, journal articles, web articles, and books to analyse the main purposes of the study. The Gramscian critical theory of ‘hegemony’ has been used as the theoretical framework since it elaborates how the states employ certain tools consciously or unconsciously to restrict dissents, and how dissents are not welcome in liberal democracies. It was evident that the use of PTA violates the fundamental rights of the activists, and harms the democracy in the country, further discouraging the social movements of the citizens.