On March 22, 2025, a 22 year-old Muslim salesman named Mohamad Rusdi was arrested by Sri Lanka's Counter Terrorism and Investigation Division after CCTV footage showed him pasting a sticker on a wall in a Colombo shopping mall. The sticker read: "F**k Israel. End Apartheid." President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, in his capacity as acting Minister of Defence, personally signed a 90-day detention order against Rusdi under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. When the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka completed its inquiry, it found a "total lack of evidence that Mr Rusdi had committed any offence" and described the case as “a stark example of the inherent dangers of the PTA and the propensity of law enforcement officials to deploy the PTA's provisions in bad faith."1 The CTID had arrested a man for expressing a political opinion and held him for two weeks without charge—because the PTA explicitly permits it.

This is not a story about one bad arrest. It is a story about what happens when you hand the state a law with no meaningful judicial oversight, a vague and infinitely expandable definition of terrorism, and the power to detain citizens for months on the suspicion that they might commit an offence in the future. The argument I want to make is not the familiar one - that the PTA has a troubled history, that it has disproportionately targeted Tamils and Muslims, that successive governments promised repeal and failed. All of that is true. Instead, the NPP government's handling of the PTA reveals that the problem is not reformable by replacement, because the replacement is itself the trap and risks reproducing the same structural abuses.

When NPP MP Jegatheeswaran was pressed on the failure to repeal the law, he offered this defence: "We can't do it right now because all over the country, even in the North and East, so many children are in possession of drugs - there is organized crime, so for this purpose we need the PTA now."2 Read that carefully. A counter-terrorism law modelled on apartheid-era South African and British anti-militancy statutes is now being justified as a drug enforcement tool. This is not an aberration; it is the law functioning exactly as draconian legislation always does: expanding to fill whatever the state decides it needs at a given moment. It has already been used against Tamil militants. Then against JVP insurgents. Then against Muslims after the Easter Sunday bombings. Then against journalists. Then against a man who made a sticker. Mission creep is not a flaw of the PTA. It is its central operating principle. 

The government's answer to this criticism has been the Protection of the State from Terrorism Act - a draft published in December 2025 and presented as the PTA's replacement. It is not. Groundviews' legal analysis found the PSTA retains presidential powers to declare proscribed organisations by gazette order, preserves broadly defined offence categories susceptible to the same abuse, and introduces a "rehabilitation" framework that civil society warns could be used to coerce detainees into compliance.3 Over 250 individuals and organizations - activists, lawyers, academics, trade unions and even former detainees - wrote to the Minister of Justice, calling the bill "a breach of the promise to the people" and warning it could entrench, rather than dismantle, authoritarian structures.4 FORUM-ASIA called it a "dangerous regression." The public consultation window was two weeks - a timeline that signals, more plainly than any ministerial statement, how little seriousness the government has afforded this process.. 

The most damning aspect of all this is not that the NPP broke a promise. It is that this particular government had no moral cover to break it. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna - the NPP's founding political constituent - was itself targeted by the PTA during the 1987-1990 armed uprising. JVP cadres were detained without charge, tortured and disappeared under the very law their current government now defends as necessary.5 Dissanayake and his party do not need a history lesson on the PTA—they lived it. Their decision to continue using it - and to replace it with something structurally similar - cannot be explained by ignorance. It can only be explained by the conclusion that when you inherit a state, you inherit its coercive instincts. 

Civil society has already answered the question the government is pretending is unanswered: does Sri Lanka need a replacement counter-terrorism law at all? The answer is no. Sri Lanka already has at least 15 existing laws under the Penal Code and other instruments addressing terrorism-related offences, alongside a Counter Terrorism Investigation Division,a National Intelligence Service and a Financial Intelligence Unit. The PTA does not fill a legal gap. It fills a political one - the gap between what the state can do under ordinary law with judicial oversight, and what it wants to do without it. 

Repeal the PTA. Do not replace it. Any other approach repeats the same justification every government has offered for the past forty-six years—and leads to the same result.

References

"A Sri Lankan Anti-Terror Law That Needs Repeal." The Hindu, April 30, 2025 https://sangam.org/the-hindu-a-sri-lankan-anti-terror-law-that-needs-repeal/ 

Centre for Policy Alternatives. "Initial Reactions to the Government's Protection of the State from Terrorism Act." Groundviews, December 17, 2025  https://groundviews.org/2025/12/18/initial-reactions-to-the-governments-protection-of-the -state-from-terrorism-act-psta/ 

Fonseka, Bhavani. “Sri Lanka's Elusive Democratic Renewal." Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2025 https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/11/sri-lanka-democracy-protest-one-year-l ater?lang=en 

Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka. Findings and Recommendations in Case No. SUO MOTU-08-25: Mohamad Liyaudeen Mohamed Rusdi vs. Director, Counter Terrorism and Investigation Division. June 12, 2025 https://www.hrcsl.lk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Findings-and-Recommendations-in-Ca se-No.-SUO-MOTU-08-25-and-Repeal-of-PTA.pdf 

Shanmugathas, Pitasanna. "One Year On: Sri Lanka's Leftist NPP Government Falls Short of Expectations." JURIST, November 8, 2025 https://www.jurist.org/features/2025/11/08/one-year-on-sri-lankas-leftist-npp-government-falls-short-of-expectations/ 

"Sri Lankan Government Faces Backlash Over Proposed Counter-Terrorism Law Amid Calls to Repeal PTA." The Online Citizen, June 4, 2025 https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2025/06/04/sri-lankan-government-faces-backlash-over-proposed-counter-terrorism-law-amid-calls-to-repeal-pta/