-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -2026.July.23, 20.50 PM)
"Justice delayed is justice denied." — legal maxim
A judiciary young enough to be afraid of its own retirement is a judiciary weak enough to be used.
Sri Lanka is not experiencing a justice problem. It is living through a justice emergency, and the arithmetic proves it.
* Over 1.13 million cases sit stuck in the court system.
* 4,572 cases pending at the Court of Appeal; 5,785 at the Supreme Court.
* Prisons authorised for 10,395 inmates hold a daily average of 27,562 — overcrowding at 265 percent of capacity, with some facilities reaching 300 to 400 percent.
* 228,450 people arrested on drug-related charges in 2024 alone, driven by heroin, cannabis, methamphetamine, and emerging synthetic drugs.
This is not a system managing crime. It is a system in collapse. The backlog suffocates victims, emboldens criminals, and destroys public trust. Overcrowded prisons, dominated by remand prisoners and drug offenders, are now a human-rights crisis and a security risk. Judicial independence, capacity, and integrity are not optional here — they are matters of national survival.
On 5–6 July 2026, a drug-trafficking dispute triggered violence at Negombo Prison — built for 900 inmates but holding close to 2,600. Inmates overpowered guards, seized firearms, and smashed CCTV cameras. Between 25 and 28 were killed, over 100 injured. Every unheard case is a body in a cell that was never meant to hold this many people.
On 11 July 2026, the Judicial Service Association met at Kaduwela to vote on extending judges' retirement ages. President Pasan Amarasena resigned the day before, alleging the meeting lacked the required quorum — 86 needed, only 46 confirmed. It proceeded anyway: all 65 present voted to oppose the extension, joined publicly by the Bar Association and the opposition.
Whatever the truth of the internal dispute, the optics are damning either way. A body meant to protect judicial independence held a vote of contested legitimacy, on a matter that determines how long its own members' colleagues on the higher courts get to serve. That is not proof of a conspiracy. It is proof of exactly the kind of structural vulnerability that should worry a President who claims to care about judicial independence — a vulnerability visible whether the vote's outcome favoured reform or opposed it.
On 10 June, Cabinet denied any decision had been made. By 14 July, it had discussed the matter "in detail," citing the backlog and a recruitment shortfall — 50 Magistrate posts sought, only 33 applicants. Its own reasoning exposed the gap: the 20th Amendment expanded the bench without revisiting the retirement age. Rather than decide, Cabinet punted to the Ministry of Justice for a report — converting urgency into paperwork, and paperwork into forgetting.
At the centre of this crisis stands a gerontocratic power bloc: a network of politicians and lawyers, almost all over 65, many over 75, some over 80, who dominate high-stakes litigation and political decision-making in Sri Lanka.
Politicians (all over 65)
* Mahinda Rajapaksa (80) — Airbus bribery allegations; Navy recruitment abuse claims; held directly responsible by the Supreme Court for economic mismanagement leading to the country's default.
* Gotabaya Rajapaksa (77) — fighting a Court of Appeal writ petition to block CID arrest over reopened Easter Sunday attack investigations.
* Ranil Wickremesinghe (77) — remanded and bailed over alleged misuse of Rs. 16.6 million in public funds during a UK transit; criticised in the bond scam inquiry.
* Nimal Siripala de Silva (82) — JICA airport bribery allegations; resigned, then reinstated.
* G. L. Peiris (79) — architect of the 2013 impeachment of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake.
* Anura Priyadarshana Yapa (67) — indicted for misappropriating Rs. 6.1 million from the CPC for campaign funding.
* Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe (67) — politically entangled in his own son's bribery and extortion case.
Lawyers (almost all over 65)
* Tilak Marapana, PC (83) — counsel for Ranil Wickremesinghe.
* Gamini Marapana, PC (80+) — counsel for Mahinda Rajapaksa.
* K. Kanag-Isvaran, PC (80+) — senior counsel for Wickremesinghe.
* Romesh de Silva, PC (79) — counsel for Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
* Anura Meddegoda, PC (65+) — counsel for Anura Priyadarshana Yapa.
* Shammil Perera, PC (65+) — counsel for Nimal Siripala de Silva.
This is not just a list of names. It is a map of power — over-65 and over-80 political actors, defended by over-65 and over-80 legal experts, operating in a system where judges are forced to retire younger than the very people appearing before them. These men have more time, more networks, more influence, and more incentive to keep the judiciary weak than the judges hearing their cases will ever have.
In the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, this same bloc engages in what can only be called judicial laundering. Over-80 and over-75 counsel spend days and hours in appellate courts, deploying relay tactics, confusion tactics, and procedural games to delay accountability for powerful clients. They exploit every technicality, every loophole, every adjournment — not to clarify the law, but to exhaust the system. And they do it in front of under-63 judges, many approaching forced retirement, who know full well that time itself is being used as a weapon against them.
This is not the noble practice of law. It is the weaponisation of procedure to protect impunity. When senior counsel treats the Court of Appeal as an arena for delay rather than justice, they are not merely defending clients — they are mocking the institution and eroding its moral authority. And they have a direct interest in keeping retirement ages low: the younger and more vulnerable the judges, the easier this game is to play.
Aristotle warned that power concentrated in a narrow, aging elite entrenches itself against the very reforms that would check it. Rawls's test is simpler still: design the rule as if you didn't know whether you'd be the judge, the litigant, or the victim of delay — and no honest version of that rule keeps judges more vulnerable than the lawyers and politicians standing in front of them.
The philosophy of conflict of interest is central here.
A conflict of interest is not proof of corruption. It is a structural condition in which a person's duty to act impartially is threatened by a secondary interest that could reasonably influence their judgment.
In this situation:
The old political-legal elite have a clear conflict of interest
They fear independent judges.
They benefit from vulnerable judges.
They gain from low retirement ages.
The competing duties
The judiciary has a duty to resist this influence and protect justice.
The President and Minister of Justice have a constitutional duty to protect the independence of the judiciary from such structural conflicts.
If powerful actors ask for constitutional interpretation on retirement age, the philosophy of conflict of interest demands that:
Their interest in maintaining impunity must be recognised.
Their opposition to raising retirement age must be treated with suspicion.
The interpretation must favour sovereignty and justice, not convenience and impunity.
Conflict of interest, properly understood, requires raising retirement age, not keeping it low.
Some in the old guard say they support raising the retirement age in principle — just not now, not for this bench, and only once bundled into a wider package negotiated at some more convenient moment. Name that argument for what it is: political hypocrisy dressed as caution, and exactly how impunity survives.
Supporting the limit while opposing the timing is judicial laundering applied to policy instead of a docket — the same relay tactics, the same procedural stalling, aimed at a constitutional reform instead of a single case. "Bundle it," "not for sitting judges," "wait for a cleaner process" all produce the same result: another year of delay, another year the powerful outlast the system meant to hold them to account.
There is no genuine conflict of interest standing in the way of this reform. The real conflict runs the other direction — a judge whose tenure depends on the goodwill of the politicians and counsel appearing before them, in a system too slow to deliver timely justice. This is a national emergency, and the NPP government was elected on a mandate to break exactly this kind of institutional capture. A government with that mandate does not need permission from the actors it was elected to check. It needs to legislate.
Legislators and judicial administrators still carry a separate duty: wherever a real conflict of interest exists — a judge hearing a case involving a politician or lawyer with a stake in the outcome — it must be addressed directly, through recusal rules and transparent case allocation. That duty demands care. It is not a reason to freeze the wider reform.
There is a moral question that cannot be avoided: can 80-year-old politicians and lawyers, who have benefited from decades of power, ethically argue against extending the service of judges beyond 60 or 63? These are people older than the judges they seek to limit, who have used constitutional amendments and legal manoeuvres to protect themselves, and who have presided over or defended systems of corruption, mismanagement, and abuse. Older judges, by contrast, have no promotions left to chase, moral distance from the authorities who appointed them, and — in many cases — a record of ruling against the very powerful actors now lecturing them about age. To argue judges must retire early while politicians and lawyers remain active into their seventies and eighties is to punish wisdom and reward impunity.
The old guard cannot credibly claim age is a problem for judges but not for themselves.
Sri Lanka's constitutional history is a history of amendments driven by political convenience, not justice — and each one was steered by a leader who, on the numbers, was never as young or as accountable to a direct popular mandate for that specific change as the process implied.
Under J. R. Jayewardene (71 at the time, since deceased), the 1978 Constitution entrenched the executive presidency. The UNP won only about half the popular vote in 1977 but, under the old electoral system, controlled roughly five-sixths of parliamentary seats — a supermajority manufactured by seat distribution, not a mandate voters had specifically given for a new presidential system.
Under Mahinda Rajapaksa (65 at the time ), the 18th Amendment in 2010 removed presidential term limits, passed with a two-thirds majority secured substantially through defections and crossovers from opposition ranks — widely described at the time as political horse-trading rewarded with ministerial portfolios, not a policy voters had endorsed at the ballot box.
Under Maithripala Sirisena (65 at the time ), the 19th Amendment in 2015 sought to rebalance power back toward Parliament — a rare case of cross-party consensus, though even this was negotiated among party leaderships and never put to voters directly.
Under Gotabaya Rajapaksa (70 at the time), the 20th Amendment in 2020 re-centralised authority, in part by narrowing the clauses that would have required a referendum under the Supreme Court's own determination, letting the rest pass by parliamentary supermajority alone. It expanded the judiciary's numbers without ever revisiting the retirement age.
Under Ranil Wickremesinghe (74 at the time), constitutional manoeuvring continued to serve political stability over structural justice, at a moment when he held the presidency without having contested it directly in a general election.
The pattern is consistent: legislative numbers built through defection and deal-making, not popular vote on the specific change; Supreme Court determinations narrowed or routed around; amendments finalised through committee-stage changes rather than tested openly on their own merits. Retirement-age rules have been shaped inside that same environment — comfortable for political actors, not optimal for justice.
The amendment now required is different in kind. It is not for the convenience of a leader or a party. It is for the 1.13 million people whose cases are stuck, the thousands of remand prisoners in overcrowded facilities, the victims of a drug crisis that produced 228,450 arrests in a single year, and the sovereign people whose trust in justice is collapsing. Raising judicial retirement age, strengthening independence, and expanding real capacity is a people's amendment, not a politician's amendment.
This is a direct appeal to the Minister of Justice, and to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake as the political leader with the mandate to act on it. You are confronted with:
a backlog of 1.13 million cases;
prisons near 300 percent capacity;
drug-related arrests surging past 228,000 in a single year;
a judiciary structurally weakened by low retirement ages;
a gerontocratic power bloc of over-80 politicians and lawyers defending impunity;
a JSA episode at Kaduwela that reveals how easily judicial capture can happen even at the lower courts.
You have a choice. Bend to the old legal-political guard of impunity — the senior counsel, the over-80 elites, the over-65 politicians who have built courtrooms for the powerful while the powerless wait outside. Or stand with the people, whose sovereignty demands a judiciary independent and experienced enough to confront power. The public mood already suggests a rejection of the old over-80 guard. What remains is whether you have the political courage to turn that mood into constitutional reality.
Do this through legislation, alongside other reforms, ethically and legally, addressing conflicts of interest wherever they actually occur — not as a reason to wait, but as the substance of the mandate the people gave you.
Sri Lanka is at a crossroads. On one side:
1.13 million cases waiting.
27,562 prisoners crammed into space built for 10,395.
228,450 drug-related arrests in a single year.
A Court of Appeal where over-80 counsel play games with justice.
A Judicial Service Association meeting that showed how easily lower-court judges can be pressured.
On the other side: Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges who have shown courage against Mahinda, Gotabaya, Ranil, and Maithripala alike; older judges whose independence only grows with age; and a people who are visibly out of patience with impunity.
The question is simple: will you let 80-year-old godfathers of impunity decide how long judges may serve, or will you let the people decide how long justice must live? Raising the judicial retirement age is not a favour to judges. It is a weapon for the powerless — a way to break judicial capture, end judicial laundering, accelerate case disposal, reduce prison overcrowding, confront drug-related crime, and restore sovereignty.
This is a national emergency, and emergencies demand courage.
To the President and the Minister of Justice: act, and history will remember you as the leaders who ended the age of impunity and began the age of justice.
Do not, and the numbers will speak for you instead — 1.13 million cases, 27,562 prisoners in space for 10,395, 228,450 drug arrests, and a judiciary kept young so the old can remain untouchable.
The people are watching.
The powerless are waiting.
The old guard is counting on your hesitation.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-07-23 15:29:34)
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