The slight improvements in political rights and civil liberties that Sri Lanka experienced after the 2015 election of President Maithripala Sirisena were stalled after Gotabaya Rajapaksa became president in 2019 and his family’s ethnic Sinhala Buddhist nationalist party Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) won parliamentary polls in 2020. A pattern of governmental mismanagement, corruption, and acute economic crisis under SLPP rule prompted the 2022 Aragalaya (Struggle) protest movement, which resulted in the ouster of President Rajapaksa and his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. A new government overseen by veteran politician Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was chosen by Parliament to serve out the remainder of Rajapaksa’s presidential term, brought relative stability, but the austerity measures it introduced under pressure from international creditors further damaged public confidence in the political establishment and contributed to a sweeping victory by the leftist opposition National People’s Power (NPP) alliance in the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections.

• In January, Parliament adopted the Online Safety Act, which drew civil society criticism for its vague criminal prohibitions on false and otherwise harmful online speech. In June, Parliament passed a Women’s Empowerment Act that would establish a National Commission for Women to protect women’s rights and draft relevant policies, though the Supreme Court blocked a broader Gender Equality Bill, arguing that it required a supermajority and a referendum to enact.
• A presidential election was held in September, and Anura Kumara Dissanayake—widely known as AKD—of the leftist NPP won with about 42 percent of first-choice votes and 56 percent of the final tally in a ranked-choice voting system. Although AKD had garnered only 3 percent of the vote in the 2019 election, he defeated 37 other candidates in 2024, including incumbent President Wickremesinghe, who placed third after Sajith Premadasa of the main opposition alliance Samagi Jana Balawegaya. International observers concluded that the election was credible and transparent, and others noted that no major candidate had sought to stoke divisions between the ethnic Sinhala Buddhist majority and the ethnic Tamil and non-Buddhist minority populations.
• After taking office as president, AKD appointed NPP lawmaker Harini Amarasuriya as prime minister and called for snap parliamentary elections, which were held in November. The NPP alliance secured an unprecedented supermajority of 159 out of 225 seats, up from just 3 in the 2020 elections, and notably won many districts in the predominantly Tamil northeast despite being a southern-based party. At year’s end, long-overdue elections for local and provincial councils were expected to be held in 2025.
• Security forces continued to disrupt protests and the work of journalists during the year, but in keeping with the NPP’s campaign pledges, the new administration took some steps to ease restrictions on the Tamil population. In November, the president ordered the closure of an army camp in the north and the return of the land to its previous owners. Also that month, authorities allowed commemorations of those killed by government forces in Sri Lanka’s 1983–2009 civil conflict, though they continued to ban the display of any insignia from the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebel group.
• The counternarcotics campaign known as Operation Yukthiya, which had begun in December 2023, continued for most of 2024, generating widespread reports of arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment in custody, and extortion. In December, a deputy minister in the new NPP government accused some police personnel of colluding with drug traffickers.

This report has been abridged for Freedom in the World 2025 due to ongoing budget constraints. Freedom in the World is entirely funded by nongovernmental sources such as private foundations, corporations, and individuals like you. Please consider making a donation to support future editions of this vital resource.

For additional background information, see last year’s full report.