Permanent Representative

His Excellency Justice (Retd) Jayantha Chandrasiri Jayasuriya, P.C. His Excellency Jayantha Jayasuriya, P.C. serves as the Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations since 03 June 2025. Prior to this appointment, he served as the 47th Chief Justice of Sri Lanka, since April 2019.

H.E. Jayantha Jayasuriya was called to the Bar in September 1982. He joined the Attorney General’s Department in 1983 as a State Counsel and served in various capacities and was appointed as President’s Counsel in March 2012. He was appointed as the 29th Attorney General in February 2016 and remained the Attorney General until his elevation as the Chief Justice. He holds the distinction of being the sixth Attorney General to be appointed as the Chief Justice of Sri Lanka.

He served as Trial Attorney in the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (UN-ICTY) from September 2001 to August 2004 and for Rwanda (UN-ICTR) from November 2000 to August 2001. He was also an examiner and visiting lecturer at Sri Lanka Law College and the Kotalawala Defence University, a member of Sri Lanka Child Protection Authority and a consultant of Financial Intelligence Unit of the Central Bank.

He is a Commonwealth Scholar (1992). He was awarded the “Best Prosecutor 2012” award by the International Association of Prosecutors, International Fellow of the National Attorneys General Training and Research Institute, United States. He holds a Master of Philosophy wdegree from the University of Hong Kong.