By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -08.Sep.2026,10.00PM) Call it what it is. Not a "crisis of impunity." Not a "structural weakness." An architecture — deliberately laid, and now inherited by a government elected explicitly to demolish it. The 22nd Constitutional Amendment (22A) Supreme Court petitions did not expose a few cracks in Sri Lanka's justice system. They exposed the load-bearing walls of a deep state built from three fused pillars: bench fixing, AG fixing, and bar fixing.
When 22A threatened the entrenched hierarchy, the response was a coordinated wall of legal petitions, a Trojan Horse raised on cue to protect factional interests. At the same moment, disputes inside the Attorney General's Department — most visibly the sidelining of aggressive prosecutors such as Senior Deputy Solicitor General Dileepa Peiris in sensitive cases — showed prosecutorial discretion manipulated from within, not merely pressured from outside. Beneath both sat the outright politicisation of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL), where professional governance mutated into factional warfare engineered to insulate political allies.
This is not three coincidences. It is one machine. And the most dangerous thing about it is not that it exists — every citizen with functioning eyes already suspects that — but that it has survived a change of government whose mandate was to dismantle it.
In legal philosophy, "fixing" across these three pillars is the total conversion of procedural legality into an instrument of elite impunity — the deep state's operating code, written in the neutral-sounding language of due process. Pierre Bourdieu's account of the "legal field" describes exactly this: a closed monopoly in which elite actors convert political capital into legal immunity, and legal immunity back into political capital, in a loop that never answers to the public it claims to serve.
"Impunity" here is not the absence of punishment. It is the presence of engineering. Bench fixing manufactures ideologically convenient outcomes through discretionary panel composition. AG fixing weaponizes selective non-prosecution, granting what Ernst Fraenkel's Dual State model calls "crony immunity" — enforcing draconian statutes against the public while shielding its own. Bar fixing neutralises the one actor meant to break the loop, turning the independent advocate into a cartel member who defends the system he was licensed to check, invoking "the rule of law" as cover. This is not judicial dysfunction. It is judicial governance, functioning exactly as its architects intended.
Bench Fixing. As documented by scholars such as Dr. Asanga Welikala, bench fixing in Sri Lanka manifests through the hyper-discretionary authority of the Chief Justice over panel selection. Benches in high-stakes constitutional or fundamental rights cases are routinely constituted to guarantee outcomes that favour executive stability, neutering the judiciary's counter-majoritarian purpose before argument even begins.
AG Fixing. As analysed by human rights legal scholar Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the dual role of the Attorney General — simultaneously chief public prosecutor and legal adviser to the government — is not an oversight to be tidied up. It is a structural conflict of interest sitting at the exact centre of the machine. The AG's Department routinely withdraws indictments or delays proceedings against politically connected figures, converting prosecutorial discretion into executive protection on demand.
Bar Fixing. As highlighted by socio-legal scholars like Dr. Mario Gomez, the Bar has abandoned its historic role as a civic watchdog. Elite factions within the BASL now operate as a protective guild for senior advocates and political patrons, using election slates to secure state patronage and to obstruct the very judicial reforms the profession should be leading.
AG fixing is not an external pressure applied by politicians from outside Hulftsdorp. It is an internal administrative reflex, calibrated to manage sensitive indictments before they reach daylight. When senior prosecutors show unyielding independence — as in the controversy surrounding the sidelining of veteran trial attorney Senior Deputy Solicitor General Dileepa Peiris — it demonstrates how prosecutorial discretion is neutralised from within, quietly, administratively, without ever needing a headline-worthy order.
By reallocating high-profile files, delaying formal indictments, or replacing aggressive trial counsel with compliant state counsel, Departmental leadership ensures sensitive investigations hit procedural dead ends on schedule. The public prosecutor's office becomes a filter of impunity — cases against powerful figures are diluted quietly, long before they could reach a court docket where the public might watch.
Every deep state needs a founding architect. In Sri Lanka's judiciary, that architect was Sarath Nanda Silva. His direct transfer from Attorney General to Chief Justice (1999–2009) was not a career promotion — it was the moment the blueprint was welded into place: executive elevation from prosecutor to judge, strategic roster control assigning judges to friendly benches, procedural delay deployed to protect executive allies, and a lasting institutional normalisation of bench-stacking that every government since has quietly copied.
As Attorney General, Silva showed how prosecutorial discretion could shield executive allies while turning state power against opponents. Elevated directly to Chief Justice by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, bypassing senior Supreme Court judges in the process, Silva fused the bench to the interests of the executive that appointed him. Over his ten-year tenure, he reshaped fundamental rights jurisprudence to his own design, curating panel composition so politically sensitive matters landed before favourable judges. Scholar Lakshman Marasinghe and other legal analysts have noted that Silva's tenure broke a long tradition of judicial restraint and established, for the first time explicitly, that the bench itself could operate as a direct political actor.
The lasting damage is not that Silva did this. It is that he proved it could be done, cleanly and without consequence — and every subsequent executive learned the lesson: control the leadership of the AG's Department and the Supreme Court, and constitutional checks and balances become theatre.
The impunity extended past the bench itself, into the mechanisms meant to check it. In 2001, opposition parliamentarians tabled an impeachment motion against Silva alleging abuse of judicial power; it collapsed only because Parliament was dissolved before it could be heard — proof that even the formal constitutional route for holding a Chief Justice accountable can be neutralised by the same executive calendar that benefits from his continued tenure. Years later, credible public reporting connected Silva's own circle to disputed land dealings around Colombo's "Waters Edge" development — allegations he was never required to answer in any independent forum, because the architecture that had elevated him also shielded him once he sat on it. This is the second half of the template every later government has copied as faithfully as the first: it is not enough to control who becomes the judge. The deep state must also guarantee that, once appointed, the judge answers to no one but the executive that put him there.
India's former Chief Justice N.V. Ramana put the uncomfortable truth in one sentence: "We have good judges, but we do not have a good judicial system." That distinction is the difference between individual conscience and institutional design, and Sri Lanka is a case study in exactly that gap.
Individual justices have, at real personal cost, preserved public trust during crises. Justice Surasena delivered independent rulings during constitutional emergencies and the Aragalaya uprising. Alongside him, Justice Janak De Silva, Justice Yasantha Kodagoda, Justice S. Thurairaja, and Justice Preethi Padman Surasena upheld fundamental rights, invalidated unconstitutional executive acts, and asserted judicial independence through the 2018 constitutional crisis, the 2022 Aragalaya movement, and the subsequent battles over economic governance. During the post-2022 reckoning, the Supreme Court repeatedly functioned as a genuine buffer against executive overreach.
But Ramana's warning is precisely what Sri Lanka keeps refusing to heed: relying on individual courage is not a guarantee; it is a gamble. The architecture surrounding these judges — executive appointment power, administrative bench-listing, a politically loyal prosecutorial infrastructure — remains fully available for capture regardless of who sits on the bench. That is why the government that inherited this architecture in 2024 has, within a year, elevated Justice Preethi Padman Surasena — one of the very judges praised above for independence — to Chief Justice. Individual integrity does not neutralise a captured system. It becomes the system's newest asset, until the architecture decides otherwise.
The political co-optation of the BASL over the past decade shows how a professional institution is absorbed rather than defeated. The leadership trajectories of consecutive BASL presidents trace a single pattern repeating under shifting administrations: institutional authority realigned, again and again, with whichever political interest is ascendant. By absorbing Bar leadership into state advisory roles, statutory boards, and executive appointments, successive governments have hollowed out the legal profession's capacity to function as an independent constitutional watchdog. The Bar was not silenced. It was recruited.
That capture is not abstract or historical — it is visible in real time. When 22A's opponents needed a wall of Supreme Court petitions to blunt reform, it was not obscure litigants who filed them; senior figures from the same Bar leadership network filed them. An advocate who sits on a government board today has every incentive to file, argue, or quietly bless a petition tomorrow that protects the arrangement that put him there. This is why BASL election seasons increasingly resemble contests for elite patronage rather than contests for the soul of the profession: candidates who promise confrontation with the executive rarely win; candidates who promise access usually do. A Bar that will not investigate its own leadership's conflicts of interest has no moral authority to lecture the public about respecting the rule of law — and yet that is precisely the role BASL has claimed for itself, even while functioning as the third and final gatekeeper protecting the architecture this essay describes.
The final year of Ranil Wickremesinghe's presidency demonstrates the three pillars moving in coordinated sequence, not as isolated events but as one deliberate strategy under electoral pressure.
Stage one secured the bench: the executive sought a six-month extension for Attorney General Sanjay Rajaratnam, PC, to keep an executive ally at the head of the prosecutorial apparatus while positioning him for eventual elevation to the Supreme Court, bypassing more senior judges. The plan collapsed only because the Constitutional Council refused the extension.
Stage two secured the prosecutorial machinery: after that rejection, the executive appointed Parinda Ranasinghe Jr. as Attorney General, bypassing Senior Additional Solicitor General Ayesha Jinasena and keeping state prosecution within a politically reliable circle. The removal of ASG Dileepa Peiris from high-profile prosecutions showed exactly how administrative authority manages sensitive proceedings once the right person holds the top chair.
Stage three neutralised the professional legal community: by maintaining ties with co-opted BASL leadership, the executive minimised organised opposition to controversial constitutional amendments and appointments.
Three stages, one strategy, one purpose — protecting a political establishment's key figures across administrations regardless of who wins the next election. This is what makes "deep state" the only accurate term. A state within the state, immune to electoral turnover by design.
Here is where comfortable history becomes uncomfortable present tense, and where this essay owes the National People's Power government its due before it names the failure. Credit where it belongs: the NPP found the political courage that every predecessor lacked to actually push the 22nd Amendment through — reasserting the Constitutional Council's vetting power over key appointments after it had been hollowed out under Wickremesinghe. That is nothing. It is the one front on which this government has genuinely moved the architecture, rather than merely inherited it.
But 22A was never the whole machine — it was one gate in a three-gate system. And on the other two gates, AG fixing and Bar fixing, the record is not delay. It is abandonment. The NPP's own manifesto named the disease explicitly, pledging an independent Office of the Public Prosecutor to sever the Attorney General's conflicted dual role for good. A technical committee was appointed in early 2025 to draft the legislation — and has since gone silent, with no public engagement and no reported progress. Resistance has emerged from inside the Attorney General's Department itself, pushing instead for vague, unspecified "internal strengthening" — the same manoeuvre used by every government this essay has documented, simply repackaged under one that promised the opposite. Attorney General Parinda Ranasinghe Jr., appointed under the executive strategy detailed earlier, remains in his post — inherited rather than replaced — while criticism of his office through 2025 has been met, by credible public reporting, with tacit tolerance of an organised social-media campaign against his critics rather than institutional answers. AG fixing has not been touched. It has been protected by silence.
Bar fixing fares no better. The BASL patronage networks described above remain fully intact under the new administration; no independent oversight mechanism referring misconduct to CIABOC has been proposed, let alone built, and the Bar continues to function exactly as it did under every prior dynasty — as gatekeeper, not watchdog.
One gate reopened is not a dismantled architecture. It is a single door left ajar in a building whose other two entrances remain exactly as locked, and exactly as guarded, as they were under every government this essay has named.
This is the sentence Sri Lanka's political class has always wanted treated as background noise: the courts are backlogged. Say it enough times, and it starts to sound like weather. It is not weather. It is policy, executed daily, by people who know exactly what they are doing when they grant the fortieth continuance in a case the public has already forgotten. A million pending cases is not a statistic. It is a million acts of justice denied, compounding by the hour, and every hour of that compounding benefits someone specific, protects someone specific, is defended by someone specific.
"Justice delayed is justice denied" is far too gentle for what is happening here. Denial implies passivity. This is active. This is engineered. Bench fixing, AG fixing, and bar fixing were built on colonial foundations, welded into a functioning machine by Sarath Silva, and perfected across successive political dynasties for their own continuance. One government has finally found the courage to reopen a single gate. None, including this one, has found the courage to walk through the other two. There is no more time to spend on committees that go silent, watchdogs held hostage to convenient timing, or manifestos quietly buried under "internal strengthening." Delay is not a procedural inconvenience.
Delay is the crime — the oldest, most efficient crime this state commits against its own people, government after government.
A state that consciously, repeatedly, and now under a government that proved it could act when it chose to, still leaves AG fixing and Bar fixing untouched is not managing a backlog. It is committing a crime against humanity's most basic promise to itself: that no one, however powerful, stands above the law.
Sri Lanka's deep state has already had seventy-seven years.
It does not need to get one more day.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
---------------------------
by (2026-09-08 16:55:42)
Read 40140 Times
Leave a Reply
0 discussion on this news