Sri Lanka - Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women - Death Penalty - January 2025
Country: Sri Lanka
Partners: World Coalition Against the Death Penalty
Issues: Death Penalty, Women's Rights
Mechanism: UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
This report addresses Sri Lanka’s compliance with its human rights obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, especially with regard to its use of the death penalty, particularly with respect to articles 1-2, 5(a), 12 and 15(1) of the Convention, as well as General Recommendations 19 and 35 on gender-based violence against women, General Recommendation 24 on women and health, and General Recommendation 33 on women’s access to justice. This report supplements the report that the authors submitted in January 2023 at the list of issues stage and provides relevant updates.
In March 2024, the Department of Prisons published detailed statistics for 2023, including relevant information about the death penalty. In 2023, Sri Lankan courts sentenced 101 persons to death, an increase from 33 in 2021 and 47 in 2022. Courts sentenced 99 of those 101 people to death for murder, including two women. The March 2024 report provides detailed information about people under sentence of death, including their sex, race, religion, marital status, literacy, prior convictions, income, use of drugs and alcohol, and occupation, but does not disaggregate those additional characteristics by sex, representing a missed opportunity for better understanding the women who are under sentence of death and the circumstances that may have contributed to them coming into conflict with the law.
Sri Lankan courts have sentenced eight women to death since 2019. The Sri Lankan Ministry
of Justice has not published an updated number of total persons under sentence of death, but
officials have disclosed that as of January 2024, 1,187 people were on death row. Publicly
available information does not disaggregate these figures by sex or gender.
