Senior Professor (Chair) Wasantha Seneviratne currently serves as the Chair Professor of Public and International Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is also the Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights (CSHR), a leading research institute affiliated with the University of Colombo. She has been an Attorney-at-Law of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka since 1995.
With nearly three decades of teaching, research, and publications in the fields of International Law, Human Rights Law, and International Humanitarian Law, Professor Seneviratne has contributed extensively to both undergraduate and postgraduate legal education in Sri Lanka. She teaches Public International Law, International Humanitarian Law, Human Rights Law, and Constitutional Law across multiple law-teaching institutions in the country. In addition, she supervises several PhD and M.Phil candidates in Law, as well as numerous Master’s dissertations, thereby fostering the next generation of scholars. She has also been engaged in international research supervision and collaborations, including joint doctoral projects and co-supervisions with foreign universities, which extend her academic influence beyond Sri Lanka.
Her postgraduate research has focused on critical issues in international law. Her M.Phil research examined Conflict-related Displacement: International Law and the Role of International Organizations. Her PhD thesis was entitled Assessing the Legality of Humanitarian Interventions in the Post-Cold War World under the United Nations Charter: An International Law Perspective. Both works reflect her deep engagement with global humanitarian and legal challenges.
Her academic contributions include authoring, editing, translating, and publishing books, book chapters, and research articles in reputed local and international journals. She has also presented widely at international and national conferences. Her primary research interests focus on theories of Public International Law; humanitarian interventions and the use of force; the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and its contemporary applications; the continued relevance of humanitarian law in post-conflict contexts; and the intersections of transitional justice and human rights in armed conflicts.
Professor Seneviratne is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Sri Lanka Journal of Human Rights, published by the Centre for the Study of Human Rights. Beyond academia, she actively contributes to public discourse and professional training, particularly in disseminating knowledge to members of the armed forces and the Police.
She presently serves as a Commissioner of the National Law Commission of Sri Lanka, a Member of the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation (ONUR), and a Member of the National Monitoring Committee on Child Rights. Her previous appointments include serving as a Member of the Expert Committee on the Formulation of a New Constitution, the Law Reforms Committee of the National Child Protection Authority, and the National Steering Committee on Police Reforms.
Her international engagements include serving as a Fellow at the Castan Centre for Human Rights at Monash Law School (Australia) and being an invited speaker at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. She has also held academic leadership roles, including serving as the Vice-President for South Asia of the Asian Society of International Law and currently as a Member of the Governing Body of the Development of International Law in Asia (DILA).
Among her recent scholarly contributions, she served as the State Volume Editor for the Encyclopaedia of International Law in Asia (Brill), overseeing the volume on Sri Lanka authored with a team of co-contributors.