• HRCSL Commissioner warns Police brutality remains embedded in SL institutional culture 
• Lawyers question protection model that relies on Police to protect victims
• Ignored trauma, inadequate support expose gaps in victim protection
• Staff shortages, scarce resources continue to hamper victim protection efforts

For nearly two years, Dilshan Madushanka has lived under Sri Lanka’s victim and witness protection programme. Two armed Police officers are stationed outside his home in Telijjawila.

He cannot work, move freely, or rebuild the life that was shattered after he was wrongfully arrested, tortured in Police custody in 2020, and later became the target of a shooting that killed his friend instead. 

His experience raises a broader question: how well does Sri Lanka’s victim protection system protect those it is legally bound to keep safe?

Six years after his ordeal began, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) delivered what it described as the longest determination in its recent history, finding that Police officers had violated four of Dilshan’s Fundamental Rights (FR) and recommending criminal and disciplinary action. Yet even after the landmark ruling, his family claims the institution responsible for protecting him has repeatedly failed to provide the assistance guaranteed under law – exposing wider shortcomings in Sri Lanka’s victim and witness protection framework. 

In practice, his family argues that the institution legally bound to keep him alive has treated him as a burden rather than a victim – threatening to withdraw the protection a court ordered, leaving him to travel to his own trial by public bus, and, at one point, driving him to hospital after a protection officer spoke to him in a manner his family described as degrading.

A case of mistaken identity

Dilshan was running a mobile phone services shop in Telijjawila in August 2020 when the Malimbada Police arrested him over a theft at a nearby wine store, claiming to have identified him from CCTV footage. He maintained from the outset that he was not the man in the images. 

His family said he was held at the Malimbada Police barracks with his hands cuffed behind his back despite a previously fractured arm and that officers stepped on his neck. He was allegedly tied up and assaulted with objects and after being transferred to the Matara Police Station, beaten on the soles of his feet with a wooden pole. 

The identification, it later emerged, was wrong. Once his family pointed out clear differences between the helmet worn by the man in the CCTV footage and the one Dilshan owned, a Police officer involved in the case reportedly apologised to his mother and admitted the error.

Rather than accountability, however, Dilshan’s family alleged the response was concealment – that he was covertly admitted to hospital to keep the incident quiet and that complaints to senior Police officers were not properly accepted in the years that followed, with the severity of his injuries downplayed and dismissed as wounds that would simply heal in time.

The Attorney-at-Law who represented Dilshan in earlier court proceedings told the court that the case had derailed a young man’s life at a point he should have been building it. A person confined to his home under permanent Police guard, with officers stationed outside his door, she said, could not realistically hold down work, sustain relationships, or live an ordinary life.

The Matara Magistrate’s Court records dated 22 May 2025 detail what happened during those five days in custody. Dilshan had been held illegally without documentation at the Malimbada and Matara Police Stations, taken to a rubber plantation, and brutally beaten – a fact the court noted was supported by medical reports. Officers falsified records, claiming the arrest took place on 29 August 2020 to conceal the days of illegal detention and torture.

The Attorney General later advised that four officers be prosecuted under the Convention Against Torture Act, in an investigation that drew statements from 24 Police officers and 13 civilians. The court initially refused the accused officers bail, citing the risk their release posed to the victim and to the integrity of the investigation, given the seniority of those involved.

A friend killed in his place

The stakes of Dilshan’s case changed in January 2024. His family said he was the target of an armed attack intended to stop him testifying – and that when he briefly stepped away from his usual chair in the shop, his friend Mindika, who had no connection to the case, was shot dead in his place. 

In the aftermath, Matara Magistrate Aruna Indrajith Buddhadasa ordered the National Authority for the Protection of Victims of Crime and Witnesses (NAPVCW) to place Dilshan under 24-hour Police protection, intended to keep him alive long enough to give evidence. 

Instead, his family said, it had become its own kind of confinement – two officers permanently stationed with him, restrictions on leaving his home, and, he said, on speaking to journalists. The four Police officers indicted over the alleged torture remain at large, and concerns were raised during Magistrate’s Court proceedings about the conduct of the original investigation, with the Magistrate noting it appeared to have favoured the Police.

The commission’s landmark ruling

The HRCSL’s 34-page determination, signed by Chairman and retired Supreme Court Justice L.T.B. Dehideniya and Commissioner Nimal G. Punchihewa, followed an inquiry into a complaint lodged by Dilshan’s mother, R. Pathirage – one she had first brought to the commission’s Matara office while her son was still in custody, seeking urgent intervention. 

She said the complaint had not been treated with urgency at the time and that an officer at the office had dismissed her outright. A subsequent FR petition to the Supreme Court had also been rejected. It was the HRCSL’s Colombo office that had eventually opened a full investigation. 

Nine witnesses gave evidence before the commission. According to the HCRSL report (HRC/MT/245/20/N), it found that Police Inspector Nuwan Buddhika Wijethunga, Police Inspector Saman Wijesekara, and Chief Inspector Chandra Jayawickrama had violated Dilshan’s rights under Article 11 (freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment), Article 12(1) (equal protection of the law), and Articles 13(1) and 13(2), which govern lawful arrest and detention procedure. 

The commission also raised concerns over whether Judicial Medical Officer (JMO) Dr. Shyam Samarawickrama had properly discharged his professional duties, finding he had failed to adequately document Dilshan’s injuries. 

The three officers were ordered to personally pay Dilshan Rs. 100,000 each in compensation by 30 June 2026, and the commission recommended that the Inspector General of Police (IGP) institute disciplinary action against them, directing the IGP to report back on measures taken.

Protection prog. that offers little protection

Sri Lanka’s Assistance to and Protection of Victims of Crime and Witnesses Act No.10 of 2023 requires the NAPVCW to treat victims with dignity and to provide protection and assistance – financial support, medical care, rehabilitation, and suitable housing among them. On the ground, Dilshan’s family said, none of this had matched what the law promised. 

Although the court and the authority had discussed a monthly allowance of Rs. 35,000, Dilshan received just Rs. 2,000 for a few months before payments stopped altogether. His security arrangement lapsed months before this article was reported, and requests to discuss its renewal went unanswered. On 13 June 2026, according to his family, he tried repeatedly to reach the officers assigned to protect him – between 3.46 p.m. and 5.47 p.m., and again after 6.30 p.m. into the following morning – without success. Calls went unanswered or sat on hold. 

Even getting to court became an ordeal in itself. The Matara Magistrate had ordered that Dilshan be provided transport to attend proceedings safely; his family said that the order was inconsistently honoured. On the final day of the trial, he had no choice but to travel by public transport. On other occasions, he borrowed money to hire three-wheelers – a financial burden placed on a man the State was meant to be supporting. 

In June 2026, the NAPVCW went further, his family said, sending a letter suggesting that Dilshan’s protection would be withdrawn altogether, accusing him of misconduct for visiting a beach with friends – an outing his family said was a rare attempt to relieve the mental strain of over a year spent largely confined to his home. 

On 9 July 2026, the Matara Magistrate’s Court issued a formal order to the Senior Superintendent of Police, Matara, mandating that Police provide both security and transport for Dilshan at all future court dates, specifically citing his next hearing on 11 November 2026. 

Multiple attempts to reach NAPVCW Chairperson and former Court of Appeal Justice Wickum Kaluarachchi for comment were unsuccessful.

‘Very institution meant to protect him is often the threat’

HRCSL Commissioner Punchihewa, who also sits on the NAPVCW Board, told The Sunday Morning that victimisation rarely stayed confined to one person. When someone is harmed, according to him, their family – a child, a spouse, or a parent – becomes caught up in the harm too, and a fair trial becomes difficult to secure in a system where legal representation is costly and hard to access for ordinary people.

He was candid about a deeper problem: that the institutions meant to protect citizens are, too often, the ones causing harm. He pointed to Police brutality and corporal punishment in schools as examples of a troubling pattern, one made worse by an absence of public condemnation. 

Some segments of society, including some teachers and Police officers, he said, still regarded physical assault as a necessary part of discipline or investigation – an accepted subculture. Public silence on this, he warned, functioned as tacit approval, allowing cycles of institutional violence to continue unchecked. He called for a shift away from investigative and disciplinary methods that relied on force. 

On resourcing, Punchihewa was equally frank. The authority suffers from a general staffing shortage, a lack of bilingual officers in a multilingual society, a severe shortage of vehicles that limits welfare checks on victims, and financial constraints that leave the allowances and transport the law permits largely unmet in practice.

‘They cannot work, cannot move, cannot live’

Attorney-at-Law Suren D. Perera, who has represented victims navigating the protection system, described a structural conflict at its heart: the Victim Protection Act tasks the Police with protecting people, even when elements of the Police are themselves the source of the threat. 

Victims reporting threats – sometimes threats from officers – were often sent back to the very station they feared to record their statement, he told The Sunday Morning, calling it deeply traumatising for people already afraid to return. 

Perera said that the authority, based in Colombo, relied on local Police stations to carry out protection in distant areas, meaning victims like Dilshan ended up living with uniformed officers in their homes exerting constant psychological pressure. Court orders for transport, he said, were frequently ignored, citing a lack of resources. There are no dedicated safe houses either – only temporary rented accommodation that offers little real security, with no separate funding or specialised staff behind it.

The visible presence of armed escorts, he added, cut both ways. Rather than signalling protection, it often reads to the public as a sign the person under guard has done something wrong, damaging a victim’s dignity and standing in their own community. Many victims, he said, also suspected their assigned protection officers were quietly reporting their movements back to those connected to the original case.

Perera pointed to a broader absence of trauma-informed care in the system: no dedicated trauma counsellors, no proper mechanism ensuring women are examined by JMOs due to a lack of female JMOs, and no State support for relocating victims who need to escape stigma and rebuild elsewhere. 

In Dilshan’s case, he said, the psychological toll had gone largely unaddressed until he had been hospitalised after being effectively trapped at home for a year. He also noted that Dilshan had sustained a broken leg during his ordeal, for which the State has provided no medical rehabilitation, leaving him unable to walk long distances. Protection, Perera said, ended at the courtroom door; victims are left vulnerable to intimidation from the accused and their associates outside it, with no formal State support to shield them. 

The cost of Dilshan’s case has not stopped with him. His father had suffered serious health issues brought on, his family said, by the stress of the ordeal. As things stood, one of his sisters was disabled and Dilshan had been taking care of her. His other sister was forced to move abroad to support the family financially after the shooting at his phone shop, which killed his friend and effectively ended the business.

What comes next

The HRCSL’s ruling was, by its own account, unprecedented in scale. Three officers were given a deadline of 30 June 2026 to personally pay Dilshan the compensation the commission ordered. Four others await prosecution. The Matara Magistrate has now formally directed Police to provide Dilshan security and transport for every future hearing, with his next court date set for 11 November 2026.

None of it changes what his days currently look like. Two officers still occupy the space outside his door. His shop is gone. His friend is not coming back. And the institution built specifically to carry him through to the next hearing has, by his family’s account, left him borrowing money for three-wheelers and waiting by a phone that no one answers.

Dilshan’s case has proven, in the length of a commission ruling and the weight of the charges against his torturers, that the system can recognise what was done to him. Whether it can protect him long enough to see it through remains, six years on, an open question.

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Severe understaffing at NAPVCW

Sri Lanka’s victim and witness protection framework is anchored in the Assistance to and Protection of Victims of Crime and Witnesses Act, originally enacted in 2015 and strengthened through Act No.10 of 2023. The mandate of the National Authority for the Protection of Victims of Crime and Witnesses (NAPVCW) is to uphold, promote, and enforce the rights of crime victims and witnesses while ensuring their safety throughout criminal proceedings. 

The authority is administered by a Board of Management and comprises divisions responsible for legal and law enforcement matters, protection services, policy and programmes, and finance. 

When a complaint is received – either directly from a victim or witness, or through a court or commission order – the Protection Services Division works with the Police Assistance and Protection Division to conduct a threat assessment. Depending on the level of risk, the authority may provide interim protection, relocate victims to safehouses, or facilitate testimony through audio-visual links so witnesses do not have to appear in the same courtroom as alleged perpetrators. 

However, the authority’s own figures suggest that demand continues to outpace its capacity. 

According to its 2023 Annual Report, the authority received 452 complaints, comprising the following: 

• 189 requests for protection
• 105 complaints relating to violations of victims’ or witnesses’ rights
• 110 investigations into offences committed against victims or witnesses
• 48 requests for financial or other assistance

During the year, interim protection was maintained in 18 complaints and 18 court-ordered cases, while 162 complaints remained under investigation with interim protection in place. Audio-visual testimony was facilitated in only 14 court proceedings, transport assistance was provided to just four victims attending court, and officers appeared before courts on behalf of victims in 40 cases.

The authority has also struggled with significant staffing shortages. Although its approved cadre stood at 56 officers, only 30 positions were filled by the end of 2023, leaving 26 vacancies, including the key posts of director general and director of protection services. The Annual Report also notes that no staff received local or overseas training during the year because funds allocated for training were never released.

Safehouse facilities have seen only modest improvements. A UNDP-funded grant of Rs. 965,000 was used to construct a protective iron fence around the authority’s existing safehouse, while a dedicated safehouse keeper was appointed by the end of 2023. Although further infrastructure improvements were identified as a priority, lawyers and victim advocates say available capacity remains limited, with some relocations continuing to be arranged through private networks rather than the State protection system. 

The authority also manages a Protection Fund, financed through parliamentary allocations, court-imposed penalties, grants, donations and investment income. As of 31 December 2023, the fund held Rs. 28.78 million. During the year, it received Rs. 2.88 million from court penalties and Rs. 4.02 million in interest income. Yet direct compensation paid to victims amounted to only Rs. 251,025 despite the sizeable balance in the fund. Separately, through a partnership with Victim Support Asia, two victims received $ 1,000 each in financial assistance during 2023.