Statement of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia
Sivarasa Anojan, a Tamil migrant worker from Natpiddimunai in Kalmunai and a graduate of Uva Wellassa University, is now awaiting execution in Saudi Arabia — sentenced to death by an appellate court in Al-Ahsa not for any act of violence, but for a Facebook comment that he reportedly removed within minutes of posting and followed with a public apology. The escalation of his case, from a five-year prison term to a capital sentence, was facilitated at every step by the very institution supposedly charged with protecting him: the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry. The case lays bare, with brutal clarity, the relationship between the Sri Lankan state and the working people it exports abroad as a source of foreign exchange.
Anojan was convicted on July 28 on two counts: a cybercrime charge under Article 6 of Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Cyber Crime Law, and a Sharia offense of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The lower court sentenced him to five years in prison and a fine of three million Saudi riyals — roughly $800,000, an astronomical sum for a migrant labourer. The public prosecutor had demanded a harsher, discretionary ta’zir punishment for the blasphemy charge; the trial judges declined to impose it.
It was at this point that the Sri Lankan state intervened — with catastrophic consequences. According to documents reviewed by Jaffna Monitor, the Foreign Ministry facilitated an appeal even after its own embassy in Riyadh had obtained legal advice describing the chances of success as “extremely low.” No warning was ever recorded to Anojan’s family that, under Saudi procedure, an appeal can increase a sentence — including elevating a prison term to death. The appeal was built entirely on the statutory ceiling of the cybercrime count, a ceiling that did not apply to the blasphemy charge, which carries no upper limit under the Hanbali school of jurisprudence. By reopening the question of whether the punishment was excessive, the appeal placed the entire sentence back in play — including the harsher penalty the prosecutor had sought and the trial court had refused.
On Thursday, the appellate court overturned the prison term and imposed a death sentence.
A ministry that charges the condemned
The family’s treatment by the Sri Lankan state is a study in bureaucratic contempt for the working class. Anojan’s father paid Rs. 1,890,766 — about $6,300 — directly into an official account held in the name of the Foreign Ministry Secretary at the Bank of Ceylon, the deposit slip marked simply “Anojan case.” The ministry sent a copy of the appeal to the father more than three weeks after it was filed, and one day before it was decided — by which time nothing in it could be changed. The family was never told the name of the lawyer who actually appeared at the hearing. And they learned of the death sentence not from their government, but from Anojan himself, who was permitted to telephone home after the hearing.
This is the same state that refuses to protect migrant workers who lose their jobs in Oman. As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reported, in January 2024, when a group of Sri Lankan workers who had been thrown out of work gathered outside the embassy in Muscat to demand that their government bring them home, the embassy responded by declaring that it bore “no responsibility” for them because they had entered on tourist visas, and instructed them to pay fines and leave the country. Roughly 80 workers, including 30 women, were arrested by Omani police, while the embassy’s own “safe house,” established purportedly to protect women, was closed to those seeking refuge. The stranded workers were left sleeping on cardboard on the pavement beside a highway, without toilets or sanitary facilities, exposed to extreme heat by day and cold by night, surviving on the charity of fellow workers. When they protested, gangs wielding iron rods attacked them and attempted to drag women away by force — attacks the workers said the embassy supported.
That abandonment took place under the government of Ranil Wickremesinghe; Anojan’s life now hangs in the balance under the JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, which inherited the same state apparatus, the same dependence on remittance revenue, and the same contempt for the workers it exports. The political colour of the regime changes, but the treatment of the migrant worker does not — because it is not a matter of individual ministers but of a state that depends on the labour of its citizens abroad while refusing to spend a rupee of its remittance earnings on defending their lives.
The reactionary character of the Saudi regime
The death sentence is not an aberration but an expression of the character of the Saudi state itself — a feudal-capitalist monarchy whose legal system combines medieval Sharia jurisprudence with the repression of an oil oligarchy. In Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan and the other Gulf states, Sri Lankan workers — disproportionately women employed as domestic servants — face conditions that amount to modern slave labour. The kafala system binds migrant workers to employers who control their residency and can withhold wages and passports with impunity. The regime’s barbarism toward foreign workers is well documented: it beheaded four Sri Lankan workers in 2007, and in 2013 it executed Rizana Nafeek, a young domestic servant, despite international pleas for clemency. Amnesty International documented that over the ten-year period from 2014 to 2025, foreign nationals accounted for nearly three-quarters of all individuals executed for drug-related crimes.
Anojan’s case carries a further, specific horror. Because blasphemy against the Prophet is prosecuted as a “public right” (al-haqq al-amm), there is no private victim and no family that can grant forgiveness or accept blood money — the route through which governments have previously saved citizens facing execution in the Gulf. Only the Saudi king, by royal order, can halt the sentence. The political establishment’s response — petitions to President Dissanayake and appeals to the Saudi monarchy for “clemency” — is an exercise in futility and self-deception. It begs mercy from the very system that produced the sentence.
Anojan’s case exposes the Sri Lankan State
The case exposes the lie at the heart of the Sri Lankan state’s entire migration policy. Workers from the war-ravaged Northern and Eastern Provinces — among the poorest and most marginalised in the country, affected by the near thirty-year civil war waged by the Sinhala-dominated state against the Tamil people— are driven abroad by the economic devastation imposed at home through IMF austerity, only to be sold into the jurisdiction of a Gulf monarchy where their labour is super-exploited and their lives are legally worthless. The same government that profits from their remittances charges their families for incompetent legal representation, conceals the risks, and abandons them to the executioner.
No appeal to the Sri Lankan government, the Saudi monarchy, or the “international community” can save Anojan or the hundreds of thousands of workers in his position. These are appeals to the very forces responsible for his predicament. Both the Sri Lankan government and the Gulf monarchies profit from this system of exploitation of migrant labour. It is a product of the global capitalist order, in which impoverished workers from South Asia and Africa are exported as cheap labour to serve the Gulf oligarchies, whose own prosperity rests on their labour.
Unite to save Anojan’s life!
Every day that passes brings Sivarasa Anojan closer to the executioner’s blade. The window for a five-judge Bench Supreme Court challenge is a matter of weeks, and it must be used not for quiet diplomacy but for a maximum mobilisation of the working class. The precedent exists: the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk, the Ukrainian socialist imprisoned by the Zelensky regime, demonstrated that when workers, youth, port workers, students and academics across the world raise a single voice — through international pickets at embassies and consulates, through statements from factory floors and rank-and-file committees, through public meetings and a relentless public exposure of the injustice — the ruling classes who imagine their victims are invisible are forced to reckon with the organised power of the class they exploit. The same method must now be applied to save Anojan.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia ( SLAA) and theSocialist.LK call on every worker and young person to demand, immediately and unconditionally, that the Saudi court reverse its death sentence and that Anojan be freed and returned home. Let no one be deceived that this can be left to the Foreign Ministry that charged his family Rs. 1.89 million for an appeal that killed him, or to the politicians who now posture over his fate while begging mercy from the very monarchy that condemned him. Pressure must be exerted on the Saudi authorities and on the Sri Lankan government through the only force they fear: the mass mobilisation of the working class, in Sri Lanka, in the Gulf, and across the world. The only force capable of defending migrant workers is the organised power of the working class itself. The unity of Sri Lankan, Indian, Bangladeshi, Filipino, Nigeria and all migrant workers in the Gulf, in struggle against both their home governments and the Gulf regimes, is the precondition for stopping these executions and, ultimately, for abolishing the system of exploitation that compels workers to sell their lives into servitude abroad. We must build an international campaign — a campaign of class struggle, not of bourgeois dignitaries — to save Anojan’s life. His life depends on it, and so does the defence of every migrant worker who has been abandoned to the barbarism of the Gulf monarchies by the state that sold their labour for remittances.
