Sri Lanka’s North and East: A New Rights Record Demands Answers on Surveillance

When victims’ families, journalists and civil-society organisers say they are watched before they protest, meet or commemorate, the accountability question is no longer simply whether surveillance occurs. It is what legal authority permits it, who supervises it and what remedy exists when power is abused.

A newly published CIVICUS Monitor assessment, drawing on an October study by the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, says victims’ families, civil-society actors and journalists in the Northern and Eastern Provinces continue to report surveillance, intimidation and harassment, particularly around protests, commemorations and demands for truth and justice. The report describes organisers receiving calls before meetings and participants being monitored or intercepted around public events.

These are serious findings, but they should be stated carefully. They do not establish that every security contact is unlawful, nor do they prove criminal misconduct by particular officers. Security agencies may lawfully gather information for legitimate purposes. The public-interest issue is whether monitoring is necessary, proportionate, authorised by law and subject to independent oversight — especially when it affects protected expression, peaceful assembly, journalism or advocacy for families of the disappeared.

The state already has a warning on record

The Human Rights Commission said earlier in 2026 that women human-rights defenders in the North and East had reported increased interventions by officers of the Criminal Investigation Department and Counter-Terrorism and Investigation Division during 2025. The Commission said complaints, field visits and stakeholder meetings raised fundamental-rights concerns involving expression, peaceful assembly and lawful occupation. It wrote to the Ministry of Public Security and the Inspector General of Police.

That creates a measurable accountability test. The Ministry and Police should publish a substantive response: what instructions were issued after the Commission’s intervention; whether intelligence and police units were reminded of the legal thresholds for questioning activists; how complaints are investigated; and whether disciplinary or corrective action followed any substantiated abuse.

Why foreign missions should pay attention

Diplomatic missions, UN bodies and international organisations regularly fund reconciliation, media-development and civil-society programmes in Sri Lanka. Their partners cannot work freely if participation in a meeting or memorial creates a reasonable fear of later questioning. Engagement with Colombo should therefore include practical questions about safeguards, complaint mechanisms and protection for defenders — not merely broad assurances that civic space is respected.

The same principle applies to commemoration. The state has a legitimate duty to prevent incitement to violence and offences under law. But remembrance, grief, documentation and peaceful political expression are not interchangeable with advocacy of violence. Restrictions should be grounded in specific lawful necessity rather than identity, geography or the subject being commemorated.

Lanka Witness assessment: Sri Lanka can answer this issue without compromising legitimate security work. Publish the rules, identify the oversight, respond to the Human Rights Commission’s findings and show what happens when an officer crosses the line. Transparency is the strongest rebuttal to a claim of systematic intimidation.

Image: Vikalpa | Groundviews | Centre for Policy Alternatives, “Stop the War on Journalist in North” protest, Jaffna, via Wikimedia Commons. Free-licensed image; used illustratively and not as a photograph of the events described in this article.