The National Medicines Regulatory Authority Act will be amended to bring cosmetics under regulation, Health Minister Nalinda Jayatissa told Parliament on Friday, saying the amendment would be tabled within three months.
The minister said provisions for regulating cosmetics would be introduced into the NMRA Act, No. 5 of 2015, the Daily Mirror reported. He gave the timetable as “within the next three months”.
That is the whole of the filing. It does not say what the provisions would do, what penalties they would carry, which products would be covered, or whether a draft exists.
A gap that is at least seven years old
The regulatory hole the minister is describing is not new, and the promise to close it is not new either.
Cosmetics were regulated in Sri Lanka by the Cosmetics, Devices and Drug Regulatory Authority, the body the NMRA replaced in 2015. The function did not survive the transfer: it was left out of the Act that created the NMRA.
Daily FT reported on 13 July 2019 — seven years ago — that amendments were then being prepared to give the NMRA “wider purview to regulate cosmetic products in the market” along with revised penalties, and that the revision was at that point with the Legal Draftsman. That report also recorded that the NMRA was monitoring imported cosmetics only at the point of entry, following a Cabinet decision, with products registered by Customs on arrival. It is archived on ft.lk and is cited here as history, not as current reporting.
Friday’s statement therefore restarts a clock rather than starting one. Neither the minister’s remarks as reported, nor the 2019 account, explains why the amendment did not pass in the intervening years.
Why it matters now
Enforcement has in the meantime fallen to consumer-protection law rather than medicines law. In September the Consumer Affairs Authority raided Pettah traders over skin-whitening creams and other cosmetics — action taken under the CAA’s powers, not under a cosmetics regulator’s.
The NMRA’s capacity has also been under scrutiny on the medicines side of its remit, including over delays to dengue vaccine imports this month.
Sourcing
This account rests on a single verified newsroom. A search of Hiru News, NewsFirst, EconomyNext and News.lk found no other filing on the minister’s statement at the time of writing; Ada Derana’s site has returned a CloudFront block to this desk for more than a month and could not be checked. The 2019 Daily FT report was fetched and date-verified before being used as background.