Sri Lanka's Supreme Court voids a 2019 pardon and sends Gnanasara back to prison

Sri Lanka's Supreme Court on Thursday, 10 September 2026, struck down the presidential pardon that freed Buddhist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara in 2019 and ordered him back to prison to finish a six-year sentence. A three-judge bench led by Justice Janak de Silva held that then President Maithripala Sirisena's act was "arbitrary and invalid."

Gnanasara, 51, is general secretary of the Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist Power Force. In January 2016 he interrupted a Homagama Magistrate's Court hearing on the 2010 disappearance of political cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda. He threatened Sandya Eknaligoda, the cartoonist's wife, and spoke in defence of military intelligence officers accused in the abduction. The Court of Appeal convicted him in 2018 of contempt and criminal intimidation. The Supreme Court upheld that conviction in October 2018.

He served less than a year. Sirisena pardoned him on 23 May 2019 and gave no reason. The pardon came a week after Buddhist mobs attacked Muslim homes, mosques and shops following the Easter Sunday bombings. Rights groups and the Tamil National Alliance called the clemency a reward for majoritarian politics. Two years later President Gotabaya Rajapaksa put Gnanasara on a task force to propose legal reforms.

The petitions that produced Thursday's ruling were filed by Sandya Eknaligoda and the Centre for Policy Alternatives, among others. The bench restored the original sentence and directed that the monk be returned to custody. In 2025 he received a separate nine-month term for insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred. That case is distinct from the Eknaligoda file.

Presidential pardon power in Sri Lanka is wide. Courts rarely unwind it. The finding that Sirisena's decision was arbitrary sets a marker for later clemency fights. It does not rewrite the constitution. It does put a nationalist monk who once sat on a presidential task force back inside a prison system that released him after a political signature.

Prageeth Eknaligoda has not been found. His cartoons dealt with media freedom and the use of military power after the civil war. Sandya Eknaligoda has spent 16 years in courtrooms asking where he is. Thursday's order does not answer that question. It does reverse the moment in 2019 when the state told her that the man who threatened her in open court could go home.

Gnanasara rose after 2012 as a public voice against Sri Lankan Muslims. His organisation filled a space that opened once the war against the LTTE ended in 2009. The court's language on Thursday was institutional, not theological. It treated a pardon as an administrative act that failed a legal test. Enforcement now sits with the prisons department and the police, not with the Bodu Bala Sena.