How Sri Lanka’s Online Safety Act can be weaponised: Arundhati Roy’s persecution as template

Technology 1 Minute

In an article titled ‘Will India’s Booker Prize-winning author face jail for 14-year-old remark?‘, the BBC reported,

Will one of India’s most celebrated writers really face prosecution for things she said more than a decade ago? Last week, 14 years after the original complaint, Delhi’s most senior official granted permission for the Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy to be prosecuted under India’s stringent anti-terror laws. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) is notorious for making it exceptionally challenging to get bail, often resulting in years of detention until the completion of trial.

The specifics of Roy’s case matters for Sri Lanka too.

Since January this year, and most recently on a live-streamed conversation conducted by Good Governance Yaya (GGY) on Sri Lanka’s Online Safety Act (OSA), I’ve stressed how this draconian legislation can be weaponised by Executive fiat, those in power or their proxies to hold anyone accountable for anything posted anywhere online, at any time in the past.

The OSA is to Sri Lanka, what the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is to India in how the law can be used to target critical dissent, activists, and writers. The OSA provides a legal framework to go back in time, de-contextualise, and selectively pick any statement made anywhere online as being somehow violative of the law – thereby holding anyone in Sri Lanka accountable for content, commentary, and online discourse from the first time they ever went online.

I made this point on the GGY’s live-stream, and the relevant segment is below.

The full live-stream is on YouTube, and Facebook.

If we are concerned about what Arundhati Roy has to now face, activists, writers, and critical dissent in Sri Lanka under the OSA countenance precisely the same threat. As long as the OSA is in Sri Lanka’s statute books, it can be weaponised in the same manner against individuals, and institutions those in power want to threaten, harass, and silence.

This is why I have repeatedly noted – despite some in Sri Lanka’s civil society who think otherwise, and believe the OSA can be fixed through amendments – that the law must completely rejected, and repealed.

Cover image courtesy The Economist.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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