-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -11.Aug.2026, 4.50 PM) “The delay in the administration of justice is the slow poison of our entire system of justice, and a key reason for the gradual deterioration of the public's faith in the country's justice system.” - Justice Yasantha Kodagoda, PC, Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, 52nd Annual Convocation of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka, May 2026
Two and a half thousand years ago, when King Dutugemunu marched north to reunify a fractured island, he did not fight alone. Beside him rode ten giants — the Dasa Maha Yodhayo of the Mahavamsa chronicle: Nandimitta, Suranimala, Mahasona, Gothaimbara, Theraputtabhaya, Bharana, Velusumana, Khanjadeva, Phussadeva, and Labhiya Vasabha. Each carried a different strength — one unmatched in single combat, one a master of siege, one a scholar-warrior, one a keeper of counsel. None of them was replaceable mid-campaign. Dutugemunu did not rotate his giants out during the siege of Vijitapura for the sake of novelty. He kept them, because the war was not yet won.
Sri Lanka is again at war — not against an army, but against 1,131,818 pending cases choking magistrate courts, district courts, high courts and the appellate tiers. This is not an abstract statistic. It is 1.13 million families, businesses, and accused persons waiting — some for six, seven, eight years — for a verdict that the Constitution promised them without unreasonable delay. Justice Kodagoda called this delay a 'slow poison.' Poison of this kind does not respond to hesitation. It responds to sustained, disciplined treatment from people who already understand the disease.
This is the argument of this paper: that Sri Lanka's current Supreme Court bench is its Dasa Maha Yodhayo — a rare, assembled formation of criminal law specialists, constitutional scholars, administrative law experts and commercial law authorities who have already begun the siege against the backlog. To break up this bench now — through court-packing, premature replacement, or simple neglect — is to send Dutugemunu's giants home in the middle of the campaign for Vijitapura. And it is to abandon the one piece of reform legislation capable of finishing what they started: the Judicial Reform Bill.
This paper does not ask the reader to accept the metaphor on faith. It asks the reader to look at the evidence: a court system carrying more than a million pending cases, a bench that has already begun reversing that trend, and a piece of legislation sitting in front of Parliament that would lock those gains in place. The giants are not a decoration on this argument. They are the clearest available image for what institutional memory actually costs to rebuild once it is broken — and how long a nation waits when it lets that happen.
The scale of the crisis is structural, not seasonal. Magistrate and lower courts alone carry more than 800,000 pending matters — 70.7% of the national total. District civil and land courts hold roughly 262,665 more. The general and commercial high courts, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court together account for the remainder. Since the 1978 Constitution, the backlog has grown almost without interruption: roughly 150,000 pending cases in the 1980s, 350,000 by the late 1990s, 550,000 by 2009, 750,000 by 2019, and now over 1.13 million — even as the judicial cadre has grown only modestly, from under 220 judges to roughly 400.
The causes are well documented: appearance-based legal fees that reward repeated hearings rather than swift resolution; routine adjournments granted out of professional courtesy rather than necessity; piecemeal trials that spread a single case across years instead of consecutive sitting days; and an acute shortage of judges — Sri Lanka fields roughly 20 judges per million citizens, against an international benchmark of 40 to 60. Registries remain paper-based, with more than 4,100 support-staff vacancies and files that are still lost, misplaced, or handwritten into existence one witness at a time.
Singapore, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have each shown that this kind of backlog is beatable — through court-managed timetables, judicial registrars who triage routine motions, digital case files, and mandatory pre-trial mediation. None of those reforms, in any of those countries, was implemented by judges who were new to the bench. They were implemented by senior jurists who had already earned the institutional trust needed to force lawyers, litigants and ministries to change their habits. That is precisely the position Sri Lanka's current bench now occupies.
Judicial transformation is not simply an administrative fix; it is, as the current bench has already demonstrated, a philosophical reorientation of what the judiciary owes the citizen. Five commitments define it: justice as a moral imperative rather than a procedural courtesy; the rule of law as structural discipline rather than a slogan; judicial independence as a constitutional safeguard rather than a privilege; sovereignty as constitutional guardianship rather than raw executive power; and judicial consciousness — the accumulated wisdom that only years on the bench can produce.
Each of Dutugemunu's giants carried a different weapon because a siege demands different skills at different moments. Sri Lanka's Supreme Court bench today carries the same kind of assembled diversity: criminal law specialists, constitutional scholars, administrative law authorities, civil and commercial law experts, and jurists with direct trial-level and prosecutorial experience. This balance was not created by accident. It is the product of decades of careful appointment. A bench reshuffled or purged mid-transformation loses that balance instantly — and it cannot be rebuilt by decree.
Two further considerations sharpen the stakes. First, investor confidence: sovereign credit ratings and foreign direct investment decisions price in judicial predictability, and a sudden restructuring of the apex court reads to markets as institutional instability, not reform. Second, and more fundamentally, court-packing converts the nation's highest constitutional authority into a political instrument — the very outcome the current bench has spent the past several years resisting.
The current Supreme Court bench, like the legendary formation it echoes, is not one hero but many, each anchoring a different front of the transformation:
Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena — case-management reform, crisis leadership, and a proven record of independence, including the 2018 crisis injunction.
Justice S. Thurairaja, PC — a former Solicitor General strengthening criminal appellate jurisprudence and procedural discipline.
Justice E.A.G.R. Amarasekara — civil and administrative law, protecting procedural fairness and administrative accountability.
Justice A.H.M.D. Nawaz — constitutional and administrative law, expanding rights jurisprudence.
Justice Kumuduni Wickremasinghe — civil and family law, humanising the civil justice system for vulnerable litigants.
Justice A.L. Shiran Gooneratne and Justice Arjuna Obeyesekere — administrative and public law, strengthening judicial review and governance accountability.
Justice Janak De Silva and Justice Sampath B. Abayakoon — civil and commercial law, safeguarding contractual and commercial predictability.
Justice Achala Wengappuli, Justice K. Priyantha Fernando, Justice Menaka Wijesundera, and Justice Sampath K.B. Wijeratne — criminal trial and evidentiary expertise, anchoring fair-trial protections and sentencing integrity.
Justice Mahinda Samayawardhena and Justice Sobhitha Rajakaruna — constitutional interpretation and procedural rights, guarding the doctrine of proportionality.
Together these justices form a bench with no obvious gap — criminal, civil, commercial, constitutional and administrative law are each represented by a jurist who has spent a career in that specific field. Remove even two or three of these giants mid-siege, and entire fronts of the reform effort are left undefended.
“Increasing judicial strength is the need of the hour … Without an adequate number of judges … the judicial institution cannot deliver timely justice.”
-Justice Yasantha Kodagoda, PC, on assuming his seat at the Supreme Court
If Chief Justice Surasena leads the formation, Justice Yasantha Kodagoda, PC is its Nandimitta — the giant whose personal force of conviction sets the tone for the entire campaign. With more than thirty years of prosecutorial experience, a record of international human-rights representation, and a period as Acting Chief Justice in 2025, Kodagoda is the jurist most responsible for naming Sri Lanka's justice crisis as a moral emergency rather than a bureaucratic inconvenience.
His public interventions reach well beyond the courtroom. Addressing the accounting profession, he warned that commercial ambition can never be allowed to override the wider public interest, insisting that professionals who serve corporations remain, first, custodians of public trust rather than instruments of profit. Reflecting on his own move from the Attorney General's Department to the judiciary, he described the shift candidly as one requiring him to replace the interests of the Executive with fidelity to legislative policy and the equal weight of individual rights against those of the State — a rare public acknowledgment of the discipline judicial independence actually demands of the person who exercises it.
In the tense years following the Aragalaya, Kodagoda became one of the most consistent judicial voices defending civil liberties, cautioning against governments that treat protest as a threat to be extinguished rather than a democratic right to be protected, and insisting that fundamental rights guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all citizens regardless of political convenience. He has been equally direct about the limits of state power during moments of national crisis, arguing that security operations must remain strictly proportionate and lawful even at the most difficult of times.
This is why Kodagoda deserves his own chapter rather than a line in a list. A bench can be technically competent without being ethically anchored. Kodagoda is the reason this bench is both. Removing him — or unsettling the bench around him — does not just cost Sri Lanka a skilled jurist; it costs the country the clearest moral voice currently arguing, in public and under his own name, that delay is a human-rights violation and that judicial capacity is a national emergency.
It is worth pausing on what each of these figures represents in practice, not just in title. A criminal-trial specialist on the bench means sentencing decisions are reviewed by someone who has sat through hundreds of trials, not someone learning the rules of evidence on the job. A commercial-law authority means contract disputes that determine whether foreign investors get paid are decided by a jurist fluent in the mechanics of modern finance. A family-law expert means custody and protection matters are handled with the empathy those cases require, not processed as generic civil filings. Strip out any one of these specialisms and an entire category of Sri Lankan litigants loses the expertise their case actually needs.
Legends are tested in battle, and this bench has already been tested. Since 2022, the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that peaceful protest is protected expression, that arrests and detentions must meet constitutional standards, and that citizens retain their rights even during periods of acute political instability. It has strengthened the jurisprudence against custodial torture, treating it as a grave constitutional violation rather than an unfortunate exception. It has continued to hear cases against sitting ministers, refusing to suspend judicial review for the sake of political convenience.
None of this was guaranteed. A newly assembled or politically selected bench, without the accumulated independence this one has demonstrated under pressure, could not be relied upon to repeat this record. And with a new constitution and structural reforms — an independent prosecutor's office, a strengthened ombudsman system — now on the table, the same bench that has already shown it will not bend to political convenience is precisely the bench Sri Lanka needs to review them.
The current bench is not asking for indefinite tenure; it is asking for the time to finish a 24-month campaign already underway. In the first six months, mandatory case-management rules would shift calendar control from lawyers to judges and consolidate preliminary motions into single filings. In months six to twelve, e-filing, digital registries and audio recording would begin replacing paper files and handwritten trial notes, while the 4,100-plus vacant registry posts are filled. From months twelve to twenty-four, continuous day-to-day trials would replace piecemeal hearings, court-annexed mediation would become mandatory for smaller civil and commercial claims, and prosecutorial capacity would expand to match nearly seventy High Courts nationwide.
Since Chief Justice Surasena took office, the backlog has already been reduced by more than 1,500 cases, Supreme Court filing has been digitalised, a new case-management system has been implemented and proven effective, and judges are sitting full weeks to accelerate disposal. These are not promises. They are results — fragile, early results that a change of bench could unwind overnight.
Ask yourself plainly: what kind of country dismisses its own giants in the middle of the siege? Sri Lanka does not lack laws. It does not lack judges of ability. What it has lacked, for four decades, is the political will to let its most capable jurists finish what they started — and the legislative machinery to back them. The Judicial Reform Bill is that machinery. It is the single piece of legislation that converts the current bench's case-management reforms, digitalisation drive, and registrar-triage model from informal practice into binding law that survives any one judge's tenure.
To delay the Bill, or to gut it in committee, is to hand the backlog another decade of life. To replace the bench that is already fighting this war — through political pressure, court-packing, or simple neglect — is to disarm Sri Lanka's own Dasa Maha Yodhayo before Vijitapura has fallen. Dutugemunu did not win by trusting the campaign to strangers. He won because he kept his giants in the field until the war was finished.
Parliament now faces the same choice.
Keep the warriors on the bench.
Pass the Judicial Reform Bill. Finish the siege that 1.13 million pending cases, and the citizens waiting behind every one of them, have already waited far too long to see won.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-08-11 11:28:22)
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