Sri Lanka court voids Sirisena's 2019 pardon and sends Gnanasara back to prison

Sri Lanka's Supreme Court on Thursday set aside the presidential pardon that freed Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara in 2019 and ordered the Bodu Bala Sena general secretary to serve the remainder of a six-year prison term.

Justices Janak De Silva, Sobhitha Rajakaruna and Sampath B. Abayakoon held that then President Maithripala Sirisena's act was arbitrary, contrary to public trust and the rules of natural justice, and ultra vires the powers given by Article 34 of the Constitution. The bench declared the pardon null and void and of no force or avail in law. It also found a violation of the equal-protection guarantee in Article 12(1).

The fundamental rights petitions were brought by Sandya Eknaligoda, whose husband, cartoonist and journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda, disappeared in January 2010, and by the Centre for Policy Alternatives. The case sat for seven years after the monk walked out of prison having served less than a year.

What the 2018 conviction covered

In January 2016 Gnanasara entered a Homagama magistrate's court where a disappearance inquiry was under way and threatened Sandya Eknaligoda in open court. The Court of Appeal later convicted him of contempt of court and criminal intimidation and, in 2018, imposed six years' imprisonment. He was 51 on the day of Thursday's ruling.

Sirisena signed the pardon on 23 May 2019. Rights groups at the time said the decision undercut the courts in a case that already tested whether a disappeared journalist's family could obtain a hearing. Two years later President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed the same monk to a presidential task force on legal reform, a posting that rights lawyers treated as a second political gift.

How the bench read Article 34

Article 34 gives the president a discretion to grant pardons. The court said the discretion is held in trust for the public and remains open to judicial review. Justice De Silva wrote that Sirisena had effectively approved a recommendation without showing that he had independently considered the material that the Constitution requires him to weigh.

The bench also settled a narrower point that will travel beyond this file. A pardon, it held, does not erase a conviction or the sentence a competent court has passed. It only relieves the offender from execution of the sentence to the extent the pardon specifies. Once the pardon falls, the original sentence stands and the time already served is credited against it.

That finding answers the question of what happens next. Gnanasara is to return to prison for the unserved balance. The Attorney General and the prison authorities now have to execute the order. No stay was recorded in the first public reports of the judgment.

Why the file still matters in 2026

Bodu Bala Sena, often rendered as Buddhist Power Force, rose in the early 2010s as a Sinhala Buddhist pressure group. Gnanasara was its most visible speaker. Critics, including Muslim and Christian organisations and several UN special procedures, accused the group of feeding anti-Muslim campaigns that preceded the 2014 Aluthgama riots and later communal clashes. The monk has denied that his sermons caused violence.

The island's clergy still holds social weight that no party can ignore. A court that tells a president he cannot use clemency as a political instrument, and then sends a monk back to a cell, is therefore a statement about the limits of both the robe and the executive. Anura Kumara Dissanayake's government, which took office after the 2024 election, was not a party to the 2019 pardon. It now has to house a prisoner whose supporters treat the case as persecution and whose opponents treat it as belated accountability.

Sandya Eknaligoda has spent sixteen years asking what happened to her husband. Prageeth left home on 24 January 2010 and has not been found. The contempt episode in 2016 was one more public humiliation in that search. Thursday's order does not locate him. It does restore the sentence that a court passed when a monk used a courtroom as a stage.

Presidential pardons in Sri Lanka have a thin paper trail. Files often record a recommendation and a signature, not a reasoned minute. The Supreme Court has now said that a signature without a recorded consideration is not enough. Future presidents who want to empty a cell will have to leave a trail that a later bench can read.

Gnanasara's remaining term is a matter of arithmetic once prison records are produced. The larger question is whether other clemencies from the Sirisena and Rajapaksa years will be opened on the same ground: that the president treated Article 34 as a personal favour rather than a public trust. Thursday's judgment gives petitioners a template. It also tells the clergy that a robe does not place a convicted man beyond the reach of a later court.