-By Dr. Lionel Bopage
(Lanka-e-News -16.Aug.2026, 8.20 PM) Once again, the spectre of the hangman has returned to Sri Lanka’s policy discourse. At the “Ratama Ekata” National Operations Council convened at the Presidential Secretariat on 10 August 2026, the imposition of the death penalty for drug-related offences was raised as a possible response to the country’s deepening narcotics crisis. The Cabinet spokesman has since clarified that no final decision has been taken. Before any such decision is reached, policymakers would do well to pause and reflect on history, on evidence, and on the values the nation claims to uphold.
The position advanced here is unambiguous: capital punishment should be opposed in all circumstances and should not be imposed, whatever the crime and whoever the accused.
Sri Lanka has not carried out an execution since 1976. Half a century of de facto moratorium is a humanitarian record worth defending, not discarding. Yet across those five decades, successive leaders have periodically threatened to resume hangings, invariably in response to public anxiety about crime. President Chandrika Kumaratunga did so in 1999. President Maithripala Sirisena went furthest in 2018 and 2019, signing execution warrants for drug convicts in open admiration of the Philippines’ murderous “war on drugs,” until the Supreme Court stayed his hand and the electorate removed him.
What should strike any serious policymaker is this: the death penalty has remained on Sri Lanka’s statute books throughout this entire period. Courts have continued to impose death sentences for murder and drug offences, and more than a thousand prisoners languish on death row. If the mere existence of capital punishment deterred crime, Sri Lanka should have been free of murder and narcotics long ago. It is not. The drug trade has grown more organised, more transnational and more lucrative precisely during the decades in which the noose hung over it. The penalty has demonstrably failed to address either violent crime or the drug menace. Escalating from sentencing to actual execution will not change the economics of an illicit trade whose syndicates treat couriers as expendable and factor extreme risk into their enormous profit margins.
Nor should it be forgotten who actually ends up on death row. It is not the financiers, the launderers or the politically protected kingpins. It is the poor courier, the addict, the small fry — those without resources for competent legal defence, convicted within a justice system burdened by prolonged pre-trial detention, under-resourced forensic services and, at times, coerced confessions. In such a system, execution carries the irreversible risk of killing the innocent. No state can undo a wrongful hanging.
Those urging executions point abroad, but the international record points the other way. The Philippines under Duterte pursued the most extreme punitive experiment of our era: thousands killed, overwhelmingly from poor urban communities, an International Criminal Court investigation, and a narcotics market that simply adapted and endured. Singapore, the other favoured example, is a compact, wealthy, intensively policed city-state with minimal corruption — conditions that bear no resemblance to Sri Lanka’s and that even so have not stopped trafficking attempts into that country. Its model cannot be transplanted to an island with vast maritime borders and strained institutions.
By contrast, Portugal confronted a devastating heroin crisis in 2001 by moving in the opposite direction: treating addiction as a public health matter, decriminalising personal use, and freeing its police to concentrate on smuggling networks and financial flows. Drug-induced deaths fell dramatically, and youth consumption declined. The United Nations, whose General Assembly has repeatedly voted for a universal moratorium on executions — resolutions Sri Lanka itself supported in 2016 and 2018 — has made clear that drug offences do not meet the threshold of the “most serious crimes” for which international law even contemplates capital punishment. Resuming executions would place Sri Lanka in breach of its obligations under the ICCPR, invite the loss of GSP+ trade concessions, and isolate the country from the more than one hundred nations that have abolished the practice.
The effective answers to the drug menace are unglamorous but proven: financial intelligence and aggressive asset forfeiture directed at the wealth of syndicate leaders rather than the bodies of their couriers; modernised maritime interdiction in cooperation with regional partners; dedicated courts to clear case backlogs; and community-based, medicalised rehabilitation that pulls users out of prisons and out of the retail market. That is where national energy and resources should be directed.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna itself opposed the death penalty in principle from the 1970s onwards, viewing punitive state killing as an instrument of oppression rather than justice. Whenever later governments flirted with resuming executions, the JVP consistently opposed such moves as populist theatre that distracted from the state’s failure to confront corruption and the social roots of the drug problem. It would be a bitter irony indeed if a government led by that very political tradition were now to become the one that reopens the gallows after fifty years.
This warning carries particular weight coming from those who lived through, and lost comrades and compatriots to, the eras when the Sri Lankan state killed with abandon — through emergency rule, through counter-insurgency, through death squads. Sri Lankan society knows intimately what happens when the state claims the right to take life. Restoring that right in judicial form will not cleanse it; it will normalise it. Article 11 of the Constitution prohibits cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. The country’s religious traditions alike affirm the sanctity of life and the human capacity for reform.
The drug crisis is real, and public anger is understandable. However, policymakers are elected to lead with evidence, not to perform toughness with other people’s lives. The death penalty has failed as deterrence, fails as justice, and would fail Sri Lanka as policy. The government should reject this proposition, formalise the moratorium of death penalty, and move instead toward its abolition — joining the community of nations that have concluded that no state should kill in the name of its people.
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by (2026-08-16 14:53:49)
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