-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -10.Aug.2026, 8.00 PM)
“All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil…”
-Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle (1913), the novel of Silindu’s Beddagama
Why the government should proceed with judicial tenure reform, and why the Bar Association of Sri Lanka has forfeited the moral authority to stop it
When Jayadeva Uyangoda speaks, Colombo’s political class listens — not because he is a government loyalist, but because five decades as one of the island’s most independent-minded constitutional scholars, forged in the 1971 insurrection, have earned him the right to owe nobody a favor. So when Uyangoda broke ranks with the legal establishment — telling the Sunday Sinhala paper Silumina that the two-year extension of judicial tenure should proceed despite the opposition against it — it did more than add one more voice to a news cycle. It reframed the debate. His argument, in substance: the controversy had been manufactured. The Joint Opposition turned a technical administrative question into a fight, the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) climbed aboard, and a professional guild found itself marching beside a parliamentary bloc hunting for a win it could not get at the ballot box. If a scholar as skeptical of executive power as Uyangoda is willing to say this in print, the comfortable assumption that BASL’s opposition is simply principled defense of judicial independence deserves a second look.
Every organized bar lives an uneasy double life. On one hand, it functions as a public trust institution — a check on executive overreach, a guarantor of due process. On the other, it is inescapably a guild, its members’ livelihoods and prestige bound to the structure of the courts they appear before. Max Weber’s notion of social closure explains how elite professions wall off insiders from outside scrutiny. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the legal field describes how symbolic capital — titles, silk, bar leadership — becomes currency spent as readily to shield peers as to defend the public. And a plain cartel theory of professional bodies predicts what an unaccountable bar will do over time: protect its most senior members from statutory enforcement, trade political support for soft landings, and enforce one standard for juniors and another for leaders.
None of this makes bar opposition to reform automatically illegitimate. When a bar contests an executive attempt to hand-pick judges or gut due process, it is doing exactly the job the public trusts it to do. The trouble is that the same institutional machinery — the same solidarity, the same reflex to circle the wagons — fires whether the threat is to judicial independence or merely to the guild’s own comfort. The question worth asking of BASL in 2026 is not whether bar associations can ever be right to object to a retirement-age amendment. It is whether this particular Bar, under this particular sequence of presidents, has earned the benefit of the doubt.
A useful framework from the comparative literature on bar behavior separates principled guardianship from cartel protectionism along four axes: who benefits from the resistance, what it actually targets, what alternative it proposes, and whether the reform expands or restricts public access to justice. Guardianship benefits the litigating public, targets genuine overreach, offers alternatives, and expands access. Protectionism benefits the guild, targets transparency measures that threaten billable work, offers nothing but the status quo, and restricts access to a licensed elite. Applied honestly, the framework should make BASL uncomfortable: an association that has spent a decade managing its own senior members’ financial improprieties through peer committees rather than statutory referral is not obviously the disinterested party this framework requires.
The pattern is not unique to Sri Lanka.
When the Delhi High Court moved routine cheque-bounce litigation into digitized “Digital Courts,” local bar associations struck — citing procedural disruption, but visibly mourning the daily physical-appearance fees that had sustained local practice for decades.
When Uganda rolled out its Electronic Court Case Management Information System, bar chapters organized walkouts over server outages and “digital illiteracy,” even as digitization threatened to close off the informal delays lawyers had long monetized. In both cases, a guild facing a threat to its economic model reached instinctively for constitutional language — because constitutional language is what makes an economic complaint sound like a public interest. That reflex, once you know to look for it, is hard to unsee.
Retirement-age disputes sit closer to the legitimate end of that spectrum than digitization fights do — changing tenure rules for sitting judges genuinely can be used to reward friendly benches or freeze out junior advancement, and reasonable people can object to it. But the same literature that explains legitimate bar objections also supplies the test for illegitimate ones: who is the primary beneficiary of the resistance, and does the resisting body have clean hands? That second question is where BASL runs into serious trouble.
The last seven Bar presidencies tell a consistent story: an institution that repeatedly converts activist capital into personal reward, and repeatedly resolves its own senior members’ misconduct internally rather than referring it to statutory authorities — the exact “soft landing” pattern the cartel-theory literature predicts.
Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, PC (2012–2013): led the Bar’s resolutions against the impeachment of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake, then, as Justice Minister in 2015, brokered the executive deal that let Mohan Peiris exit his disputed Chief Justice appointment without formal parliamentary prosecution — a soft landing negotiated by a former Bar president wearing his new government hat.
Upul Jayasuriya, PC (2013–2015): mobilized the Bar aggressively against the Rajapaksa administration, then, within weeks of leaving office, accepted the chairmanship of the Board of Investment from the incoming government — activist capital converted almost instantly into an executive appointment.
Geoffrey Alagaratnam, PC (2015–2017): the cleanest tenure of the seven, yet in 2024 was the senior counsel tapped to head the Bar’s own internal inquiry into the JICA funds scandal — self-policing again, rather than referral to the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC).
U.R. De Silva, PC (2017–2019): steered the Bar through the 2018 constitutional crisis, then in July 2026 appeared as defense counsel in the fifty-count Prevention of Terrorism Act trial over the alleged plot to spring Harak Kata from custody — evidence of how readily former Bar leadership converts into the island’s highest-stakes criminal defense retainers.
Kalinga Indatissa, PC (2019–2021): presided over an accommodating Bar stance toward the 20th Amendment’s centralization of executive power while himself taking on state advisory roles — co-optation almost too on-the-nose to require comment.
Saliya Pieris, PC (2021–2023): the outlier, and it should be said plainly: filing Fundamental Rights petitions to keep a CID detainee alive is a legitimate, necessary exercise of the profession’s protective function, whatever one thinks of the client. His tenure complicates any claim that BASL is simply and always a cartel; it is offered here for completeness, not accusation.
Kaushalya Nawaratne, PC (2023–September 2024): his presidency collapsed after roughly Rs. 19 million of a Rs. 21 million JICA anti-corruption grant was distributed as professional fees to a five-member team — Nawaratne personally received Rs. 6 million, Deputy President Nalinda Indatissa PC received Rs. 3 million, none of it disclosed to the Bar Council beforehand. The money was returned and Nawaratne resigned, but the matter went to an internal committee, not to CIABOC. An association that exists partly to police corruption chose not to report its own president’s alleged misuse of an anti-corruption grant to the anti-corruption authority. That is not a technicality; it is the soft-landing mechanism in its purest form.
Rajeev Amarasuriya (2025–present): held a Central Bank of Sri Lanka governing board seat awarded by the previous administration while assuming the Bar presidency, and now leads BASL’s campaign against the retirement-age amendment. In June 2026, when attorney Rakitha Rajapakshe — son of former Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe — was produced before the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court over an alleged bribery scheme, nearly a hundred lawyers turned out at the courthouse, prompting the Bar to issue a public disclaimer that it had not authorized official representation for the suspect. The disclaimer itself is telling: an unauthorized mass mobilization of the profession’s elite around one of its own is precisely the optics a genuinely independent public-interest body would work to avoid, not merely explain after the fact.
The prosecution of organized crime leader Nadun Chinthaka, alias “Harak Kata,” is a case study in how high-stakes criminal litigation intersects with political figures, bribery allegations, and multiple generations of BASL leadership.
March 3–7, 2023 — India travel and initial phone negotiations. Official immigration records confirm that attorney Rakitha Rajapakshe (son of former Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe), Charith Abeysinghe, and Aruna Sri Warushahennadige traveled together to India, returning on the same flights four days later. During the trip, Abeysinghe contacted associate Nirmala Bandara (“Herby”) from India to negotiate financial terms for an alleged bribe involving Harak Kata’s wife, Maheshika Madhuwanthi.
March 15, 2023 — extradition. Harak Kata was extradited from Madagascar and placed under a Detention Order under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) in CID custody.
March 21–28, 2023 — Dubai visit. Then-Minister of Justice Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe traveled to the UAE on an official visit. CIABOC later submitted these dates to court to investigate potential overlap with concurrent bribery negotiations.
March 25–29, 2023 — Dubai bribe negotiations. Rakitha Rajapakshe, Abeysinghe, and Warushahennadige traveled to Dubai and met Harak Kata’s wife. According to CIABOC’s court submissions, a bribe solicited at Rs. 500 million and agreed at Rs. 200 million — with Rs. 120 million paid as an advance — was negotiated to facilitate Harak Kata’s release or transfer from strict CID detention.
March–mid 2023 — Fundamental Rights filings. As sitting BASL President, Saliya Pieris PC filed Fundamental Rights petitions in the Supreme Court on Harak Kata’s behalf, to prevent extrajudicial execution or torture in CID custody.
June 25, 2026 — CIABOC arrests and courtroom mobilization. CIABOC arrested Rakitha Rajapakshe, Abeysinghe, and Warushahennadige over the Rs. 120 million bribe probe. When they were produced before the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court, senior counsel appeared alongside a crowd of nearly 100 lawyers. Under sitting BASL President Rajeev Amarasuriya, critics accused the Bar of elite protectionism, forcing BASL to issue a statement clarifying it had not authorized official representation for the suspects.
July 2026 — PTA escape trial. Former BASL President U.R. De Silva PC appeared in court representing defense suspects in the fifty-count PTA trial over the alleged CID escape conspiracy involving Harak Kata.
Put the pieces together and the government’s critics have the causation backwards. This is not a clean, apolitical Bar being steamrolled by an authoritarian executive. It is a Bar leadership with a documented pattern of shielding its own from statutory accountability — now visibly entangled, however tangentially, in the island’s most notorious current bribery scandal — that has found in the retirement-age amendment a convenient vehicle for rebuilding its damaged standing, draping self-defense in the borrowed authority of judicial independence.
The Joint Opposition needed an issue; BASL needed a rehabilitation narrative; the two found each other, exactly as Uyangoda suggested. A government that lets a compromised guild’s self-interest dictate the pace of judicial reform is not protecting the rule of law. It is outsourcing constitutional policy to the very body whose leadership has spent a decade proving why it should not hold that authority unchecked.
The bill should go to Parliament and pass — because deferring to BASL’s veto now would reward exactly the behavior the Weberian and Bourdieusian critique of the legal profession warns against solidarity over accountability, guild interest over public trust.
There is a colonial dimension worth naming, too. Sri Lanka’s legal profession, like most in former British colonies, inherited a structure built for hierarchy and exclusion — English-language proceedings, wigs and gowns, a Colombo-centered senior bar controlling access to silk and to the bench. Independence never dismantled that structure; it was absorbed by a local elite that now polices its own membership, its own path to the bench, and — as the last decade shows — its own accountability. BASL’s fierce mobilization around a retirement-age amendment and its muted response to its own leadership’s entanglement in corruption inquiries are two expressions of one instinct: defend the guild first, and dress the defense in whatever constitutional language is closest to hand.
A government serious about reform should not wait for that instinct to correct itself.
Leonard Woolf spent seven years administering colonial justice out of Hambantota before turning that experience into Silindu, the impoverished hunter at the centre of The Village in the Jungle. Silindu is destroyed less by his own act than by a court built to process a villager, not to hear him — a legal machine imported wholesale and dropped onto a people it never troubled to understand.
Eight decades after that machinery passed to Sri Lankan hands, ask how much has actually changed. As of mid-2026, more than 1.1 million cases sit pending across the island’s courts — magistrate’s courts alone account for over 800,000 — with a judge-to-population ratio so thin that, spread evenly, every court in the country would be carrying well over three thousand cases at once. For the litigant waiting years on a land dispute, or the accused who has spent longer on remand than the eventual sentence, 1913 and 2026 barely differ. The wigs are optional now and the case file reads in Sinhala or Tamil, not English — but the wait is the same wait.
In the way that matters most, Sri Lanka is still a village in the jungle, and the jungle is the backlog.
That is the case a leader for Silindu’s Sri Lanka has to make — and has not yet fully made. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake came to office promising to break the elite capture this essay has traced through BASL’s last seven presidencies, and the retirement-age extension is, on the numbers, a genuine attempt to put more judicial hours against a backlog growing faster than the bench can clear it. But wanting to shrink the backlog is not the same as winning the argument over how — and winning that argument means persuading, not merely outlasting, the last bastion of Hulftsdorp.
BASL’s own record disqualifies it from claiming Silindu’s defence by default. But that does not make the government’s case unnecessary — it makes it more urgent.
If this bill is remembered as the moment the state finally moved for the million-plus Silindus still waiting on a court date, and not as one more round in a decades-old contest between palace and profession, the government cannot rest on having the better villain.
It has to convince Hulftsdorp’s lawyers — juniors as much as Presidents’ Counsel — that the reform serves the docket, not the durability of whoever happens to be sitting on it.
That is the harder, slower case.
It is also the only version of this reform that will ever reach the people the jungle has never quite let go.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-08-10 14:39:31)
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