The Hon. Ajith P. Perera
Hon. Ajith P. Perera asked the Minister of Justice and National Integration for details of prisoners under sentence of death whose appeals are exhausted and who have not received a Presidential pardon, including their names and ages. He sought confirmation that no executions have been ordered since 1976, that some death sentences are commuted to life imprisonment under Article 34(1) of the Constitution, and raised concerns about whether the commutation process is informal and not sufficiently subjective. He asked what steps would be taken to make the process more subjective and whether regulations under the Prisons Ordinance would be introduced to formalize the commencement and serving of life sentences after commutation.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 asked the Minister of Justice and National Integration: (a) Will he state the - (i) number of prisoners sentenced to death, whose appeals against the sentence had been exhausted and who have not been granted Presidential Pardon in terms of Article 34 of the Constitution; and (ii) name and age of each of those prisoners, separately?
¶ 02 (b) Will he admit that - (i) the President has not ordered any execution since 1976; (ii) in certain cases, the President commutes the death penalty to life imprisonment in terms of Article 34(1) of the Constitution; and (iii) the said process is carried out in an informal and ‘objective’ manner without being ‘subjective’?
¶ 03 (c) Will he also state - (i) the steps that will be taken to carry out the said process in a ‘subjective’ manner; and (ii) whether steps will be taken to formulate ‘regulations’ in accordance with the provisions of the Prisons Ordinance to formalize the provisions regarding the date of commencement of imprisonment and the subsequent serving of the sentence of imprisonment after the death penalty is converted into a life sentence?
¶ 04 (d) If not, why?
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Tuesday, 3 March 2026 ·No. 23335 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
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/lk/speeches/14933
Cite as: The Hon. Ajith P. Perera. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 3 March 2026. No. 23335. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/14933