MONETABRIEF – Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court revoked a presidential pardon for controversial Buddhist monk Galagodaatte Gnanasara and ordered him back to prison for six years for disrupting proceedings at a lower court.
A three-judge bench headed by Janak de Silva on Thursday ruled that an amnesty granted to the 51-year-old firebrand monk by then President Maithripala Sirisena in May 2019 was “arbitrary and invalid”.
Sri Lanka’s Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) and Sandya Eknaligoda, the wife of a cartoonist who had been abducted by government forces in 2010, had filed the petition challenging the pardon.
Gnanasara, who leads the nationalist Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), or Buddhist Force, walked out of prison after serving nine months of his six-year sentence for intimidating Eknaligoda.
Soon after his release from jail in May 2019, he campaigned for Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s successful election campaign in November 2019 and was rewarded with a state appointment to a panel tasked with recommending legal reforms.
The monk was the head of the 13-member “Presidential Task Force for One Country, One Law” under Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
The panel, which had no Tamils or women, was given four months by Rajapaksa “to compile a report so that all citizens are treated alike in the eye of the law”.
The findings, or the report, of the One Country, One Law task force have not been made public, but Rajapaksa’s successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, is on record as saying he had rejected it.
The monk was found guilty of criminally intimidating Eknaligoda during a hearing on the abduction of her cartoonist husband, Prageeth, who is still listed as missing.
Gnanasara had been in the magistrate’s court to voice support for military intelligence officers accused of abducting Prageeth, whose cartoons targeted the Rajapaksa family.
The monk had accused the Eknaligoda couple of supporting the Tamil Tigers and bringing the military into disrepute, a claim the family has denied.
However, President Sirisena, after talks in prison with the monk, granted him a pardon despite opposition from rights groups.
The monk later served a second prison sentence of nine months last year for insulting Islam and stoking religious tensions.
The same presiding judge of the Supreme Court, Janak de Silva, as head of a presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Easter Sunday attacks, had recommended that Gnanasara’s BBS should be banned along with Muslim extremist groups.