COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court overturned on Thursday a presidential pardon granted to a hardline Buddhist monk and ordered him to serve the remainder of a six-year prison sentence for intimidating the wife of a missing cartoonist.
The ruling marks a major setback for Galagodaatte Gnanasara, 51, a Buddhist nationalist monk whose critics accuse him of fuelling anti-Muslim sentiment and religious tensions in Sri Lanka.
A three-judge bench ruled that the pardon granted by then president Maithripala Sirisena in May 2019 was ‘arbitrary and invalid’. The court reinstated Gnanasara’s sentence and ordered his return to prison.
The case was brought by the Centre for Policy Alternatives and Sandya Eknaligoda, whose husband, political cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda, disappeared in 2010 and remains missing.
Rights groups had opposed the clemency, arguing it undermined the rule of law.-AFP