Lal Wijenayake

Lal Wijenayake died on Saturday 31 October 2026, aged 85. Hiru News reported that he died that afternoon, while Newswire and the Daily Mirror reported his death on Saturday evening. No cause of death was made public.

His death was reported by Hiru News, Newswire, the Daily Mirror, Newscenter and other Sri Lankan outlets, which described him as a senior lawyer and a veteran figure of the left. Former Minister of Justice Ali Sabry PC paid tribute to his defence of judicial independence, saying: "Lal Wijenayake was a legend in his own right. Whatever his political allegiance, his heart remained with the people and his conscience remained his own." The Sri Lanka Guardian published an editorial, "Rebel Within No More", on 1 November. Funeral arrangements were to be announced later by his family.

Lal Wijenayake received his education at Dharmaraja College in Kandy, one of the city's leading schools. He went on to the Faculty of Science at the University of Peradeniya and then trained at Sri Lanka Law College, qualifying as an attorney-at-law. Published reports of his death did not give details of his parents or his early family life, and Kandy remained his home base for most of his public career.

Wijenayake combined legal practice with a long career in left-wing politics. For several decades he was a Politburo member of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), Sri Lanka's oldest Trotskyist-rooted socialist party. After leaving the LSSP he played a leading role in establishing the United Left Front, continuing his work in left-wing politics outside the older party structures. He also served as Leader of the Opposition in the first Central Provincial Council.

In December 2015 Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, with the approval of the Cabinet, appointed a 24-member Public Representations Committee on Constitutional Reform, drawn from political and civil society, and named Wijenayake as its chairman. Its members included Faiszer Musthapha PC, Kushan de Alwis PC and Dr Harini Amarasuriya. The committee first met on 5 January 2016, visited 25 districts in about six weeks and worked through some four thousand oral and written submissions, with more than two thousand five hundred people appearing before it. Wijenayake signed its final report on 10 May 2016 and presented it to the Prime Minister for the Constitutional Assembly. He also spoke abroad about the process, including at a South Asians for Human Rights seminar in Kathmandu on citizens' participation in constitution making.

In later years he joined the National People's Power (NPP) and sat on its Working Committee, Executive Council and National Operations Committee. In 2026 he broke publicly with the NPP-led government over the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, challenging it before the Supreme Court on the ground that changes affecting the judiciary required a referendum. The court found that a referendum was not needed, and Parliament passed the amendment on 25 September 2026. He also campaigned against proposed legislation on protecting the state from terrorism, while stating that he would remain within the movement.

Wijenayake kept his private life largely out of public view, and the reports of his death did not give details of his family. Colleagues remembered him as a mentor to younger lawyers and political activists. He remained engaged in public debate into his mid-eighties, and in the last weeks of his life he led efforts to set up a Left Centre in Kandy.

Wijenayake is remembered for leading one of the widest public consultations in Sri Lanka's constitutional history, the 2016 Public Representations Committee, which took the reform debate to all 25 districts. He is also remembered as a link between the country's older socialist parties and the National People's Power, and as a party figure who was willing to oppose his own side on questions of principle. Ali Sabry summed this up in his tribute: "It is easy to speak of judicial independence from the opposition benches. It takes courage to defend it against one's own side."