Do we like them?

Do we like Gotabaya Rajapaksa?

Our score: 3 out of 10. A policy that overrode Muslim burial rites against WHO advice and a court finding on the economy outweigh the little good we could verify.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa was Sri Lanka's president through the economic collapse. In November 2023 a five-judge Supreme Court bench held that he and other officials were responsible, finding they had mishandled the economy and violated people's fundamental rights. The case was brought by Transparency International Sri Lanka and activists.

The cremation saga is the part that bears on the harm test. His government made cremation of Covid victims compulsory, despite WHO assurances that burial under Islamic rites was safe. In July 2024 the cabinet formally apologised to the Muslim minority. AFP reported that Rajapaksa later defended the policy, saying he followed expert advice.

An apology from a later government is not his apology, and we haven't seen one from him in the pages we could open. The Muslim Council of Sri Lanka said it would sue two academics it named as behind the policy, which is the council's claim, not a finding. Either way, overriding a minority's funeral rites against health guidance counts as harm here.

Then there was the farm policy. In May 2021 he banned chemical fertiliser imports in a push to make Sri Lanka the first fully organic farming nation. By October that year the government reversed the ban to help tea growers, after plantation owners and farmers warned of shortages. It is a planet-friendly idea that was run badly, and the Supreme Court's later ruling sits in the same wreckage.

Now he is back in the news over the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks. In June 2026 he petitioned the Court of Appeal for an order barring the CID from arresting him in the investigation. Daily FT's report doesn't set out his grounds or say he has been charged, so no one should treat him as guilty of anything there.

Honest gaps: Tamil civil war allegations, a dismissed US lawsuit and his record on LGBTQ+ people all turned up in searches, but the pages wouldn't open for us, so we haven't built on them. On the good side, we couldn't verify any charity or kind acts from the pages we read. That is a limit of our search, not a clean bill of health either way.