President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has appointed retired judge V.K. Malalgoda as chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, along with four other members, according to the President’s Media Division. The appointments were reported by the Daily Mirror and Hiru News on Friday.
The new commission
Alongside the chairman, the members appointed are:
- S.Y.M. Gomes
- A.L.A. Azeez
- Dr S.S.S.B.D.H. Jayawardena
- Professor T. Jayasingam
Letters of appointment were handed over by Secretary to the President Dr Nandika Sanath Kumanayake at the Presidential Secretariat on Friday afternoon. Both filings give the same account, and Hiru’s photograph of the handover — taken beside the national flag — matches it.
The appointments fill vacancies created by the completion of the previous members’ terms of office. Neither filing presents this as a removal or a restructuring.
Who the chairman is
The two filings identify the new chairman only by his initials. This desk’s own reporting supplies the fuller identification: in August we reported on the Mahapola Higher Education Scholarship Trust Fund’s new payment-tracking system, whose chairman was named as retired Supreme Court Justice Vijith Malalgoda. The surname, the retired-judge description and the initial all correspond.
What the commission inherits
The HRCSL has been unusually active this month, and the incoming members take over a live caseload rather than a quiet one. In October alone this desk reported that the commission:
- asked the Justice Minister to withdraw the Prevention of Organised Crime Bill, calling it wholly incompatible with the Constitution and potentially more draconian than the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act;
- faulted the prison administration over the July Negombo Prison deaths and issued eight recommendations, including prosecuting those responsible;
- summoned the Homagama station OIC and two other officers over a death in police custody.
Separately, the Constitutional Council approved Dr Hemamal Jayawardene as a commissioner on 9 October, in a vote that deadlocked 4-4 and was broken by the Speaker’s casting vote.
Not reported
Neither filing names the outgoing chairman or members, gives the date their terms expired, or states the term length of the new appointments. Neither sets out the Constitutional Council’s role in these particular nominations. It is not stated whether the “Dr S.S.S.B.D.H. Jayawardena” named in the list is the Dr Hemamal Jayawardene approved by the Council on 9 October; the initials given do not settle it, and this desk has not confirmed that the two are the same person.
Ada Derana also filed on the appointments (news ID 250833), but its site has returned a CloudFront 403 to every fetch route for roughly seven weeks, so no publish date could be extracted and it is not cited here.
Sources
- Human Rights Commission gets new chairman — Daily Mirror, 30 October 2026
- Retired judge V.K. Malalgoda appointed as the new chairman of the Human Rights Commission — Hiru News, 30 October 2026
