Click to expand Image A police anti-riot unit in Colombo, Sri Lanka, January 30, 2024. © 2024 Thilina Kaluthotage/NurPhoto via AP Photo (New York) – The Sri Lankan government’s Prevention of Organised Crimes Bill, submitted to parliament on October 20, 2026, risks enabling arbitrary detention, torture, and other rights violations, Human Rights Watch said today. The proposed law, alongside the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill submitted on October 6, reproduces abusive provisions in existing counterterrorism laws that would allow continuing abuses that the government had pledged to end.President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s National People’s Power alliance pledged in its 2024 election manifesto to abolish all “oppressive” laws and ensure “civil rights of people in all parts of the country.” In particular, the Dissanayake government—like its predecessors—pledged to repeal the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). Both bills presented in October replicate some of the worst aspects of the PTA, shifting abusive provisions to create parallel legal structures outside existing criminal law and without basic safeguards.“Sri Lanka’s organized crime bill would enable prolonged detention without adequate judicial oversight or evidence of criminal conduct, and could encourage torture by allowing convictions based on confessions obtained by the police,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “If this law is adopted in its current form, it risks unleashing serious rights violations just as previous similarly draconian legislation has done.”The purported objectives of the Prevention of Organised Crimes Bill are to combat organized crime and support international law enforcement cooperation. It is presented as giving effect to the 2003 United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, yet fails to adhere to international standards of precision and legal certainty and removes basic due process safeguards provided in ordinary Sri Lankan criminal law, enabling the authorities to use arbitrary powers in a wide range of ill-defined circumstances.The bill defines “serious crime” as any offense punishable with at least four years in prison and lists a large number of offenses that fall under other laws, placing a wide variety of alleged criminal activity within its extraordinary authority. It defines an “organised criminal group” as three or more people acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more serious crimes to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit.Courts may consider whether a person is a member of an organized criminal group based on factors including physical or virtual meetings with known members; their style of dress, hand signs, language or tattoos; association with known members of the group; and habitually visiting premises known to be used by the group. Such provisions risk criminalizing association rather than conduct, allowing the authorities to detain a person without any evidence of criminal activity.The bill would allow the secretary to the Ministry of Public Security to issue a detention order for two months at a time, for up to a year, without giving the magistrate discretion to set the detention order aside. Bail may be granted only by the High Court, with suspects accused of a serious crime only released on bail in exceptional circumstances.In the past, the PTA incentivized torture by allowing convictions based on confessions obtained by the police. Recent reform attempts including the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill required instead for confessions to be made to a magistrate. Nevertheless, the Prevention of Organised Crimes Bill reproduces the abusive practice of making confessions to the police admissible in court, incentivizing coercion, ill-treatment, and torture.The bill provides police with broad surveillance authority, including to intercept and record communications, carry out forensic extraction of data from electronic devices, and access data from telecommunications companies and online services, through court orders.The police could, even without a court order, obtain any telecommunication, satellite, or digital service provider information relating to the identity of the owner or subscriber, calls, and the tower location, of any device, sweeping powers to expose personal communications and information and infringe rights, including of privacy and assembly. Sri Lankan law enforcement and security agencies have a long record of misusing surveillance to target human rights defenders and the families of victims of rights violations.The organized crime bill also contains sections that could curtail freedom of expression by making it an offense to publish the name or anything that could identify a victim of crime. Further restrictions are placed on media reporting of court proceedings without court permission.The bill also gives the police broad powers, on “reasonable suspicion” of a serious crime, to stop and search individuals and vehicles, or make arrests and seize relevant items. They could enter and search premises without a warrant. Taken together, the additional police powers with little or no judicial oversight are wide open to abuse, Human Rights Watch said. Sri Lanka’s experience with the PTA demonstrates the potential for serious rights violations under the Organised Crimes Bill.Repealing the PTA would fulfill a key commitment that Sri Lanka made to the European Union, in exchange for tariff-free access to the EU market under its Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+) program. However, the Prevention of Organised Crimes Bill preserves the terrorism act’s abusive features, further weakening Sri Lanka’s compliance with its GSP+ human rights commitments.The government did not appear to conduct consultations while drafting the bill. The government should withdraw the bill, undertake a genuine, open, and inclusive consultation, ensure legislation with robust safeguards to prevent arbitrary detention, torture, and ill treatment, and ensure judicial oversight and due process, in compliance with the government’s international legal obligations.“Every government has a duty to combat organized crime but needs to do so in compliance with international human rights standards,” Pearson said. “The European Union should make it clear that this bill would not meet Sri Lanka’s obligations under the GSP+ trade program.”