The United States 2019 Report on International Religious Freedom said Sri Lankan government officials “continued to engage in systematic discrimination against religious minorities,” according to reports received from religious communities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

The report highlighted how during 2019, “local government officials and police reportedly responded minimally or not at all to numerous incidents of religiously motivated violence against minorities”.

In the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings for example, the report said “although the government deployed security forces and police to control subsequent anti-Muslim violence, Muslim religious and civil society leaders reported some police stood idly by while attacks occurred”.

“Religious rights groups reported police continued to prohibit, impede, and close Christian and Muslim places of worship, citing government regulations, which legal scholars said did not apply,” it added. “Media reports stated police and military personnel were complicit in allowing Buddhists to build religious structures on Hindu sites.”

The US report also cited examples of harassment due to the Sri Lankan security forces, including Muslim women “forced to remove their abayas in front of male military personnel" and a report that “at the same location, female military officers cut off a Muslim woman’s head covering”.

“Buddhist nationalist groups, such as the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS, Buddhist Power Force), used social media to promote what it called the supremacy of the ethnic Sinhalese Buddhist majority and denigrated religious and ethnic minorities,” it added.

See the full text of the report here.

The report comes as Sri Lanka’s president Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed a Presidential Task Force to protect “archaeology” in the largely Tamil-speaking Eastern province. The task force is entirely Sinhala and has Buddhist monks as members.