President reappoints Sanjeeva Jayawardena to Monetary Board

Sanjeeva Jayawardena, President’s Counsel, has been reappointed to the Monetary Board of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), for a fresh term of six years, up to June 2027, by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, consequent to his nomination being approved by the Parliamentary Council. 

Jayawardena is the first President’s Counsel to serve on the Monetary Board of the CBSL. He presently serves as Chairman of the Monetary Board Level, External Debt Monitoring Committee and as Chairman of the Board Risk Oversight Committee. 

He also chairs the Ethics Committee of the CBSL. Jayawardena has been practicing exclusively in the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal for the last 29 years, having been called to the Bar in 1992. He was thereafter conferred Silk, as President’s Counsel, in the year 2012. 

He specialises in all aspects of Appellate Law as well as Constitutional and Public Law and has an extensively varied practice in diverse fields and subjects, including civil, contractual, commercial, property, taxation, banking and other disciplines of the law. 

Jayawardena was appointed as a Commissioner of the Law Commission of Sri Lanka by former President Maithripala Sirisena in the year 2015 and was thereafter reappointed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to the Law Commission for a fresh term of five years. 
He is a serving member of the Committee of Experts appointed by the Cabinet of Ministers and President to draft a new constitution for Sri Lanka and is Chairman of the Presidential Experts Committee on the Implementation of Data Protection in Sri Lanka.

Jayawardena is a serving member of the Council of the University of Colombo, which is the governing body of the university. He is also a member of the Incorporated Council of Legal Education, chaired by the Chief Justice, which is the governing body of the Sri Lanka Law College. 

He is also a member of the Board of Studies of the Law College, which is the academic board of the college. Further, he was recently appointed by the President as a member of the committee to make recommendations to the appointment of President’s Counsel.  Previously, he served on the Legal Cluster of the National Council for Economic Development, chaired by then Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva PC. He was a onetime appointee to the Intellectual Property Commission of Sri Lanka. 

Jayawardena was a recipient of the Outstanding Young Persons of Sri Lanka (TOYP) award in the year 2004. He is an Honours graduate in Law, LLB (Hons), of the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo and has also secured an M.Phil. in law from the same institution and has presently completed his doctoral thesis for submission in the Ph.D. degree programme of the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo. 

He has served as a member of the Special Committee of the M.Phil. degree in law of the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo and has also served as an examiner of both the LLM and M.Phil. postgraduate degree programmes and has delivered guest lectures at the faculty. He is on the Advisory Board of the LLB degree programme of the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology. 

Jayawardena is presently a serving member of the Board of Trustees of the Royal College Union and he is Co-Chair of the Law and Law Development Committee of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka and a member of the Supreme Court Committee of the BASL.  He was previously Chairman of the Superior Courts Complex Committee and a member of the Supreme Court Rules Committee and Supreme Court and Court of Appeal Bench and Bar Committee of the Bar Association.  Jayawardena’s father, the late Stanley Jayawardena, also served on the Monetary Board from 01.03.1989 to 12.09.1994.