HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF SRI LANKA, Annual Report 2018 State of Human Rights in Sri Lanka 2018 The year 2018, which celebrated the Seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), witnessed a continuation of the improvement in the human rights situation in the country observed since 2015. Even though certain incidents such as the violence against the Muslim Community in Kandy during March 2018 brought into question the protection afforded to ethnic and religious minorities in the country, the furtherance of democratic ideals and the availability of democratic spaces for citizens to exercise vigil over government actions enhanced the human rights situation in Sri Lanka. Perhaps as a result of the above, the overall number of complaints received by the Commission plunged from 7711 in 2017 to 6641 in 2018 continuing the decrease in the number of complaints received annually since 2015. While the HRCSL Head Office received fewer complaints than in the previous year, complaints received by the Regional Offices saw an increase during the year, which may be due to the extensive outreach activities conducted by the Commission, resulting in the increased visibility of the regional offices. Amidst these positive developments, an incident that deeply troubled the Commission was the communal tensions and violence caused against the Muslim community in Kandy including propagating hate speech during March 2018. Preliminary inquiries of the Commission in to previous occurrences of violence against the Muslim community in other parts of the country, such as in Ampara and Ginthota points to the fact that the violence in Kandy is not an isolated incident but the culmination of a series of violent incidents perpetrated against the Muslim community. The Commission publicly urged authorities to strictly implement the law against persons committing hate speech, and to swiftly apprehend the perpetrators as well as persons aiding and abetting the perpetrators and deal with them according to law. At the same time, the disproportionate restrictions of access to certain social media platforms during and in the immediate aftermath of the violence 12