A hardline Sri Lankan monk who’s a detailed ally of ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has been sentenced to 9 months in jail for insulting Islam and inciting spiritual hatred.
Galagodaatte Gnanasara was convicted on Thursday for the remarks, which date again to 2016.
Sri Lanka not often convicts Buddhist monks, however this marks the second time that Gnanasara, who has repeatedly been accused of hate crimes and anti-Muslim violence, has been jailed.
The sentence, handed down by the Colombo Justice of the Peace’s Courtroom, comes after a presidential pardon he obtained in 2019 for a six-year sentence associated to intimidation and contempt of court docket.
Gnanasara was arrested in December for remarks he made throughout a 2016 media convention, the place he made a number of derogatory remarks towards Islam.
On Thursday, the court docket mentioned that each one residents, no matter faith, are entitled to the liberty of perception underneath the Structure.
He was additionally given a high-quality of 1,500 Sri Lankan rupees ($5; £4). Failure to pay the high-quality would end in an extra month of imprisonment, the court docket’s ruling added.
Gnanasara has filed an attraction towards the sentence. The court docket rejected a request from his legal professionals to free him on bail till a remaining judgment was made on the attraction.
He was a trusted ally of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was pressured to resign and flee overseas following mass protests over the island nation’s financial disaster in 2022.
Throughout Rajapaksa’s presidency, Gnanasara, who additionally leads a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist group, was appointed head of a presidential process pressure on authorized reforms geared toward defending spiritual concord.
After Rajapaksa’s ouster, Gnanasara was jailed final 12 months for the same cost associated to hate speech towards the nation’s Muslim minority however was granted bail whereas interesting his four-year sentence.
In 2018, he was sentenced to 6 years for contempt of court docket and intimidating the wife of a political cartoonist who’s extensively believed to have been disappeared. Nevertheless, he solely served 9 months of that sentence as a result of he obtained a pardon by Maithripala Sirisena who was the nation’s president on the time.
