Sri Lanka Top Court Scraps Monk Gnanasara's Presidential Pardon — SkimNews
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- Sri Lanka's Supreme Court ruled on September 10, 2026, that a presidential pardon granted by then-President Maithripala Sirisena to monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero in May 2019 was "arbitrary" and "null and void."
- Gnanasara Thero, founder of the hardline Buddhist group Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) in 2012, had been serving a prison term for contempt of court and criminal intimidation at the time of the pardon.
- The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) and Sandya Eknaligoda — wife of dissident cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda, forcibly disappeared since 2010 — had challenged the pardon in court.
- In January 2016, Gnanasara stormed a Colombo magistrate courtroom and openly threatened Sandya Eknaligoda during a hearing on her disappeared husband.
- Successor President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed Gnanasara to a Presidential Task Force on legal reforms in 2021, a move widely criticised by rights defenders.
- In 2024, the Colombo High Court sentenced Gnanasara to four years' rigorous imprisonment for inciting hatred against Muslims in a 2016 press conference; he was later granted bail.
Why it matters: In a Sinhala Buddhist-majority nation where the clergy wields considerable religious and political influence, a top court striking down a presidential pardon seven years later sets a precedent that arbitrary executive clemency for politically connected monks is judicially reviewable — giving a policy NGO and a disappeared cartoonist's wife a rare institutional win against executive overreach.
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