Claim: Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya does not have a doctorate/PhD.
Fact: This claim is false. Amarasuriya holds a doctorate/PhD from the University of Edinburgh in the UK.
Several social media users are sharing a post claiming that the current Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Harini Amarasuriya does not hold a PhD or a Doctor of Philosophy degree as she and her party the National People’s Power (NPP) had claimed during their Presidential and Parliamentary election campaigns over the past six months.
Sharing the claim on TikTok, one such user wrote in Sinhala, “Harini has only done a 3-month research fellowship, not a PhD. Looks like she has also been lying! [I] found this on a congratulatory post on the university’s website, and it only refers to her as a ‘student’. What is left now to destroy is the President’s educational qualifications!”
The Newschecker team found similar claims questioning Amarasuriya’s educational qualifications on Facebook and TikTok. A few posts can be found here, here, and here.
Due to the current situation in Sri Lanka with several politicians being called out over their dubious educational qualifications, the Newschecker team decided to check the veracity of this claim.
Fact Check/Verification
Through a keyword search, we found that immediately before her election into the parliament, Amarasuriya was a Senior Lecturer (Grade I) at the Open University of Sri Lanka serving for a period as the Head of the Department of Social Studies. Her profile on the university’s faculty listing specifies her research publications in further detail. The full profile can be found here.
It must also be noted that in Sri Lanka, in order to be a Senior Lecturer (Grade I) at a state university like the Open University of Sri Lanka, one must have a Doctoral degree/ PhD with a dissertation component, according to the most recent state-issued guidelines.
Since her appointment to the parliament in 2020 as the National List Member of Parliament from the NPP, her profile on the parliament’s website has listed her educational qualifications as follows:
BA (Hons) Sociology;
MA App. Anthropology & Development Studies;
PhD, Social Anthropology
The full profile can be found here.
Newschecker team then decided to look deeper into her PhD qualification and its details. We came across a congratulatory post from the School of Social and Political Science of the University of Edinburgh which read:
“Dr Amarasuriya completed a PhD in the Social Anthropology subject area at SPS in 2010. She was also a fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), where her project focused on dissent in Sri Lanka. Prior to her career in politics, Dr Amarasuriya worked as a lecturer at The Open University of Sri Lanka.
Jonathan Spencer, Emeritus Professor of South Asian Language, Culture and Society at SPS, said: “I’ve known Harini for nearly 20 years as a brilliant student and a close friend. She is a person who combines enormous integrity and striking emotional intelligence. The task facing her is extraordinarily challenging, but she is a woman of extraordinary capacities.”
The university further has published her PhD dissertation for public access through its research database. The full dissertation can be found here.
These findings make it clear that Amarasuriya does indeed have a PhD in Social Anthropology as she had previously claimed.
Conclusion
Thus, it is clear that speculations about Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya’s doctorate/PhD being non-existent or fake are untrue.
Result: False
Our sources
Harini Amarasuriya’s profile on the Faculty page of the Open University of Sri Lanka
Harini Amarasuriya’s profile on the website of the Parliament of Sri Lanka
News update on Amarasuriya’s appointment as the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, on the University of Edinburgh website, October 2, 2024
PhD dissertation by Harini Amarasuriya, submitted to the School of Social and Political Science of the University of Edinburgh, 2010
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