Controversial Sri Lankan monk jailed for insulting Islam

A hard-line Sri Lankan monk who is a close ally of ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been sentenced to nine months in prison on charges of insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred.

Galagodaatte Gnanasara was sentenced on Thursday for the 2016 statements.

Sri Lanka rarely convicts Buddhist monks, but this is the second time Gnanasara has been accused of hate crimes and violence against Muslims.

The sentence handed down by the Colombo Magistrate’s Court comes after he received a presidential pardon in 2019 for a six-year sentence for intimidation and contempt of court.

Gnanasara was arrested in December over remarks he made at a 2016 media conference in which he made several derogatory statements against Islam.

On Thursday, the court said that all citizens, regardless of religion, have the right to freedom of belief under the Constitution.

He was also fined 1,500 Sri Lankan rupees ($5; £4). The decision of the court added that failure to pay the fine would lead to an additional month of imprisonment.

Gnanasara has filed an appeal against the sentence. The court rejected a request by his lawyers to release him on bail pending a final ruling on the appeal.

He was a trusted ally of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who resigned in 2022 after mass protests over the island nation’s economic crisis and was forced to flee abroad.

During Rajapaksa’s presidency, Gnanasara, who also heads a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist group, was appointed to head a presidential task force on legal reforms aimed at protecting religious harmony.

After Rajapaksa’s oysterGnanasara was jailed last year on a similar charge related to hate speech against the country’s Muslim minority, but was granted bail while he appealed his four-year sentence.

In 2018, he was sentenced to six years for contempt of court and scaring the wife of a political cartoonist which is believed to have disappeared. However, he served only nine months of that sentence because Maithripala Sirisena, who was the country’s president at the time, received a pardon.