Sri Lanka criminalises consensual same-sex activity between adults, under Sections 365 and 365A of the Penal Code — a law inherited from British colonial rule in 1883. Unusually, it was expanded rather than repealed after independence: a 1995 amendment extended the offence to cover sex between women, closing a gap that had existed in the original text. The penalty is up to ten years' imprisonment, and Human Rights Watch and local monitors have documented that the law is still enforced, not merely left on the books.* A bill to decriminalise was introduced in parliament in 2022; as of 2026 it has not passed.*

Equaldex scores the country 28/100 — a Legal Index of 21 and a Public Opinion Index of 34. That pairing is unusual: on most countries where the two diverge, public opinion runs well ahead of the law (Italy, Czechia). Here it barely does — even a cautious Sri Lankan public (Gallup found just 25% call their area a "good place" for gay and lesbian people)* is only marginally less restrictive than the criminal code itself. There is no recognition of same-sex marriage or partnership, no joint adoption, no hate-crime protection, and gender-affirming care exists on paper but is reported to be difficult to access.

Sri Lanka is rated a "flawed democracy" by the EIU (6.19, 2024, 67th of 167) — essentially unchanged on 2023 (6.17). The country is two years out from genuine crisis: mass protests in 2022, the "Aragalaya" ("struggle"), forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee amid economic collapse.* In September 2024, Sri Lanka elected its first left-wing president in its history, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, on an anti-corruption, pro-reconciliation platform; his coalition then won an outright parliamentary majority two months later.* The election itself scores well — electoral process is the EIU's strongest sub-score (7.00) — but functioning of government is the weakest (4.29), and that gap is the story of the last two years: real, competitive politics sitting on top of institutions still being rebuilt.

Reconciliation promises have moved slower than the campaign suggested. Dissanayake pledged to abolish the Prevention of Terrorism Act, long used against Tamil and Muslim communities, journalists and activists; the government instead published a replacement bill in December 2025 that Sri Lankan civil society groups say falls well short of that pledge,* and PTA arrests rose in the first five months of 2025 alone compared with all of 2024.* Enforced disappearances from the civil war remain largely unresolved — the Office on Missing Persons has registered more than 25,000 cases and concluded only a fraction* — though 2025 did bring a handful of first arrests in emblematic cases. Press freedom improved (RSF ranks Sri Lanka 134th of 180 in 2026, up from 139th), but a January 2024 law created an Online Safety Commission with presidentially-appointed members, empowered to act against online content in the name of national security.*

Sri Lanka scores unevenly across Fair Away's two women's-rights sources: 7.06 out of 10 on the Georgetown WPS Index (lived conditions — inclusion, justice, security) but only 4.78 on the World Bank's WBL 2026 Legal Frameworks score (formal legal rights). The 2.3-point gap between the two is the third-widest in this dataset, after the UAE and Malaysia: on the ground, outcomes are reasonable by regional standards, but the law on the books lags well behind them.

That blend also doesn't capture reproductive rights. Sri Lanka's abortion law dates to an 1883 colonial-era statute and permits abortion only to save the mother's life; anyone who causes or performs one otherwise risks up to three years in prison — seven if the pregnancy has "quickened".* UN human rights treaty bodies have repeatedly recommended Sri Lanka decriminalise abortion at least in cases of rape, incest and severe fetal impairment. It has not done so.

Sri Lanka scores 5.1 out of 10 in the WJP Rule of Law Index 2025 (0.51, 74th of 143) — a direct reading, no proxy needed. That is up 1.1% on 2024, making Sri Lanka one of the minority of countries whose score improved this year, and it ranks 2nd of 6 in South Asia, behind only Nepal. The WJP's global 2025 finding is an accelerating "rule-of-law recession" — shrinking civic space, weakening checks and balances worldwide — and Sri Lanka bucked several of those trends specifically: freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and civil justice all held steady where most of the world declined.*

The exception is judicial independence from the executive, which did weaken* — and that tracks with the accountability gaps described above: a replacement anti-terrorism law that civil society says doesn't meet the government's own reform pledge, and a two-decade backlog of unresolved enforced-disappearance cases that at least ten different commissions have investigated since the 1990s without result.*

The US Department of Labor rates Sri Lanka "Moderate Advancement" in 2024 — the same tier as the year before. The government expanded a free school-breakfast programme nationwide (previously limited mostly to remote provinces) and ran new research and police training on child protection. The problems ILAB documents concentrate in agriculture: parents on tea estates often cannot afford transport to school, pushing children out early, and smallholder tea farms report relying on children under 12 during harvest labour shortages. Sri Lanka's own 2016 Child Activity Survey undercounts the problem by international standards — it doesn't count children aged 5–11 working under 15 hours a week, or 12–14-year-olds under 25 hours, as child labourers even in agriculture.