likely to cause public disorder. Furthermore, in April 2022, the Government headed by Gotabaya Rajapaksa imposed a 15-hour nationwide block on social media platforms. In July 2022, the crowds that gathered at Galle Face Green, which was also called GotaGoGama, experienced a loss of internet and mobile connectivity. Some speculated this was due to signal jammers that were deployed at the Presidential Secretariat building adjacent to the protest site (News Cutter, 2022). These measures severely restricted the freedom of expression of people in the digital sphere, impeding the free flow of accurate information. The declaration of ERs is provided for by the Public Security Ordinance (PSO). The PSO grants the President the power to declare an emergency and to make regulations that “appear to him to be necessary or expedient in the interests of public security and the preservation of public order and the suppression of mutiny, riot or civil commotion, or for the maintenance of supplies and services essential to the life of the community”. One of the main issues with the PSO is that it does not define what constitutes an emergency, leaving the Ordinance open to wide interpretation. The President is vested with the sole discretion in declaring a state of emergency. Since independence, Sri Lanka has been under ERs almost continually, rather than at exceptional times. Even subjects such as setting up of school boards, banking, forestry, and quality control of salt were regulated through ERs by the President throughout history (Udagama, 2015). 2022 saw ERs being used to curtail the expression of dissent online. However, because courts have previously held that freedom of expression extends to anti-Government expression, and because international standards on freedom of expression state that it should be protected regardless of frontiers and regardless of which media is used, it could be argued that the use of ERs and the PSO to restrict anti-Government dissent online was unnecessary and unjust. SECTION 120 During the Aragalaya, the hashtag #GotaGoHome was symbolic of the common demand for the removal of those in power, especially President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. It was widely used on social media, and there were social media pages and groups created under this tagline which garnered a lot of reach. Threatened by the wide attention the protests were gaining in early 2022, the authorities arrested Anuruddha Bandara, an activist, for actively promoting the hashtag campaign on social media and for posting on social media about a protest happening in Kandy (Wickramasinghe, 2022). He was arrested under Section 120 of the Penal Code which constitutes an offence similar to that of sedition: conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of the State. Section 120 has been widely criticised for the use of vague and overbroad language that violates Sri Lanka’s obligations under the ICCPR Act. The ICCPR Act prohibits the restriction of freedom of expression unless they are strictly construed and proportionate. Critics have stated that Section 120 amounts to a “broad definition of sedition as an offence” (Crawley et al., 2015). It has been used to crush dissent and clamp down on protests. Over the years, Governments have abused this law to target critics and it is made evident in the number of journalists and activists arrested under Section 120 (Confronting Accountability for Hate Speech in Sri Lanka: A Critique of the Legal Framework, 2018). In 2021, Chamila Jayasinghe of the Sri Lanka Administrative Service was arrested under Section 120 of the Penal Code over a Facebook post he published, on the basis that he inconvenienced the - 09 -