Deshabandu Senior Professor (Dr.) MADSJS Niriella is a Senior Professor in Law attached to the Department of Public and International Law, Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has been serving in the Sri Lankan university system for more than three decades, engaging in teaching, research, academic administration, policy engagement, and international academic collaboration. She is an Attorney-at-Law, Company Secretary, Commissioner for Oaths, and Notary Public and a distinguished scholar in Criminal Law, Comparative Criminal Law, Criminal Justice, Human Rights, Gender Justice, Child Protection, Juvenile Justice, Restorative Justice, Environmental Justice, International Criminal Law, Emerging Technologies in Law, Criminal Procedure, Law of Evidence, Criminology, Penology, Victimology, Reconciliation, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.
At the international level, she has held several prestigious leadership and governance positions in global academic and professional bodies. She presently serves as a Board Member of the International Society for Criminology, Advisory Board Member of the Asian Criminological Society, Committee Member of the ACS Distinguished Book Award, Vice-President of the South Asian Society of Criminology and Victimology, Member of the Scientific Council of Sensus Historiae (Poland), Member of the Executive Committee of the World Center for Women’s Studies, and Member of the Research Committee of Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University, India. She is the Immediate Past Vice-President of the Asian Criminological Society. She was the Chairperson of the Graduate Student Best Paper Award Committee of the Asian Criminological Society, General Assembly Presidium Member of the Asian Criminological Society, and Board Member of the International Society of Criminology. Notably, she is the first Asian female and first Sri Lankan academic to serve on these boards.
At the national level, Professor Niriella has contributed extensively to legal, governance, reconciliation, regulatory, and criminal justice institutions in Sri Lanka. She served as a Board Member of the National Unity and Reconciliation Board of Sri Lanka from 2021 to 2025, including as a member of the first Board appointed under the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 1 of 2024. She also served as a Board Member of the National Authority for the Protection of Victims of Crime and Witnesses, the first such authority established in Sri Lanka. She was a Board Member of the Colombo Stock Exchange of Sri Lanka, becoming its first female Director. During her tenure, she chaired several committees, including as the first female Chairperson of the Disciplinary and Arbitration Committee, the Regulatory Affairs Committee, and the Dispute Resolution Committee. She currently serves as a Board Member of the Asia Crime Prevention Society.
At the university level, she has held numerous senior academic and administrative appointments, including Head of the Department of Public and International Law, Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, and Deputy Director of Examinations and Registration of the Virtual Campus, University of Colombo. Most notably, she served as the Founding Dean of the Faculty of Criminal Justice at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Sri Lanka, becoming the pioneering academic to establish Criminal Justice as a distinct discipline within the Sri Lankan university system. She was also a member of the Standing Committee on Social Reconciliation as a University Grants Commission (UGC) nominee, as well as served on several other boards as a nominee of the UGC.
Among her numerous national and international honours, the most distinguished are the conferment of the national honour “Deshabandu” in 2019 by the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, the country’s third-highest national honour, in recognition of her distinguished and meritorious service to the nation, and the APJ Abdul Kalam Jurist Excellence Award (2025) in Kerala, India, making her the first Sri Lankan to receive this distinction.
Professor Niriella has an extensive publication record, including authored books, book chapters, and journal articles published in leading national and international journals by renowned academic publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Routledge–Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, LexisNexis, Emerald, HeinOnline, Brill, and David Publishing, among others. She has also presented research papers and delivered keynote addresses, plenary lectures, invited lectures, and guest speeches at numerous national and international conferences held in Sri Lanka and abroad, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
Professor Niriella is widely recognised as one of Sri Lanka’s leading legal academics in Law, Criminal Justice, and Criminology, and has played a pioneering role in advancing legal and criminal justice education, criminology and victimology studies, restorative justice scholarship, gender justice discourse, and interdisciplinary legal research nationally and internationally.