-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -2026.July.05, 7.30 PM)
"The greatest evil is not radical; it is committed by people who refuse to think." — Hannah Arendt
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." — Martin Luther King Jr.
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." — George Orwell
"Man cannot live without masters if he refuses to see reality." — Albert Camus (paraphrase)
There is a question every civilization must eventually answer, and it is not legal but metaphysical: what is law, when the hand that writes it and the hand that breaks it belong to the same body? Sri Lanka has answered this for nearly half a century, quietly, the way every captured state does — by pretending the question does not exist.
Justice, in its truest sense, is not a verdict but a relationship — between power and restraint, between memory and consequence, between the citizen and the certainty that wrongdoing will be answered. Break that relationship and you lose not court cases but the ground beneath a shared civic world. This is Sri Lanka's condition: not a broken justice system, but an inverted one — a system so thoroughly repurposed that it now defends precisely what it was built to punish.
Since 1978, Sri Lanka has lived inside a constitutional architecture engineered for one purpose above all: to concentrate power in the executive and let it decide, quietly and permanently, who may be held accountable. Judicial appointments are politicized. Prosecutorial independence is a fiction. Commissions of inquiry exist not to discover truth but to bury it in process. Sri Lanka does not deny justice outright — that would be too visible, too easily resisted. Instead, it launders justice: diluting, delaying, reframing, drowning it in procedure until the outrage that once demanded accountability has nowhere left to stand.
This is not a story about one broken institution but about a machine — many gears, each innocent-looking alone, each devastating in combination. To understand Sri Lanka's crisis is to trace that machine gear by gear: the Attorney General's Department, the police, the commissions, the judicial pipeline, the Bar Association — asking, at every step, the same Arendtian question: who refused to think, and what did it cost?
Every architecture of impunity needs a load-bearing wall; in Sri Lanka, that wall is the Attorney General's Department — absurdly, three things at once: the government's legal adviser, the state's defender in civil suits, and sole gatekeeper of criminal indictment. Asking this office to prosecute the state impartially is asking a man to cross-examine himself and expect a confession.
International jurists have said as much more plainly. A review of accountability challenges in Sri Lanka found practitioners raising concern over the AG's Office's lack of independence and impartiality, its structural conflict of interest, and a pattern of preferential treatment for state prosecutors — including judges meeting them ex parte before proceedings began. The Supreme Court itself has said it aloud. In the X-Press Pearl ruling, the Court sharply criticized the AG's Department for filing the state's compensation claim in Singapore rather than Sri Lanka's own courts, calling the decision "unreasonable, irrational, and arbitrary," and finding that the Department's failure to indict the ship's owners had itself infringed Sri Lankan citizens' fundamental rights — a state law office found, by the state's highest court, to have wronged its own people.
This is not abstraction. It has a face: Prageeth Ekneligoda, a journalist who vanished in 2010, whose family waited nine years for an indictment and still waits for truth. It has a face in Lasantha Wickrematunge, assassinated in 2009, whose killers remain unnamed in any courtroom. It has eleven faces: students abducted and murdered, allegedly by naval intelligence, in a case slowed by the very interference it was meant to expose.
These are not exceptions. When the office that must defend the state is also the only office permitted to prosecute it, delay is not a failure of process — it is the process working exactly as designed.
Every act of justice begins with a fact honestly gathered. Sri Lanka's police have made a discipline of ensuring facts arrive broken. Court records across decades show evidence lost, chains of custody severed, testimony contradicting itself into meaninglessness, and judges' directives quietly ignored.
Consider Rathupaswala, 2013: civilians protesting for clean water, shot by soldiers, in full view of ballistic evidence and unwavering eyewitnesses. And still — years of drift. Military suspects never produced. Evidence evaporated. Judges noted, again and again, the absence of progress, as though noting it might summon it into being.
Or consider the Supreme Court's record on torture and custodial death: repeated findings of fundamental-rights violations, almost no criminal consequence. Officers implicated in torture remain in uniform. The AG's Department declines to prosecute even after the highest court confirms the wrongdoing. This is the philosophical horror at the center of Sri Lankan justice: rights exist, beautifully, on paper — and dissolve, completely, in practice. A right unenforced is not diminished. It is a decoration.
If the AG's Department is the engine of impunity, commissions of inquiry are its transmission — converting raw injustice into something merely resembling resolution. Sri Lanka has perfected the art of reopening what courts already closed, reframing what judges already found, and recommending, with grave procedural solemnity, the quiet withdrawal of cases power finds inconvenient.
The impeachment of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake in 2012 is the starkest monument to this machinery. The Supreme Court ruled the impeachment process unconstitutional. The Parliamentary Select Committee proceeded anyway. The Chief Justice was removed regardless. This was not a political disagreement dressed up as law. It was law informed, in the clearest possible terms, that it did not have the final word.
The so-called Political Victimization Commission, operating between 2019 and 2022, refined the technique further, recommending the withdrawal of numerous cases against the powerful — recommendations the AG's Department obligingly carried out. It was during this period that Basil Rajapaksa was publicly quoted stating that cases had been "cleared" — a phrase that lands, in hindsight, less like a political comment and more like a confession offered without the courtesy of a courtroom.
Then there is the Sil Redi case: Lalith Weeratunga and Anusha Palpita, convicted by the High Court for misuse of public funds, later pardoned by presidential decree — a single signature capable of unwriting what a court had already written. Ask yourself what a verdict means, philosophically, in a system where the executive retains a standing eraser.
Independence is not a single dramatic refusal. It is a thousand small refusals, compounding, over a career. Sri Lanka's judiciary has been engineered so that those small refusals become professionally fatal. Appointments, promotions, "acting" designations, retirement-age extensions, and post-retirement postings have all become instruments of quiet discipline. Judges who resisted power found themselves transferred, investigated, or politically attacked. Judges who accommodated it found themselves promoted, extended, rewarded.
This is how you capture a judiciary without ever touching a verdict: make independence expensive and deference profitable, and let incentive do the rest. Loyalty becomes a qualification, independence a liability. No memo is required. The system trains itself.
For decades, Sri Lanka's higher judiciary has been filled disproportionately by career prosecutors from the very Attorney General's Department whose failures we have traced. This is the pipeline — the quiet, structural heart of the machine.
The consequence is not corruption in any crude sense — it rarely needs to be. It is sympathy: judges trained inside the AGD's culture of delay and deference, who carry that culture onto the bench not as betrayal but as habit, who reproduce prosecutorial caution in judicial robes because it is the only professional instinct they were ever taught. A pipeline does not need to bribe anyone. It only needs to select, generation after generation, for the same temperament.
The Bar Association of Sri Lanka presents itself as the guardian of the legal profession's integrity. Yet its record tells a more complicated story — one in which its interventions have, again and again, aligned with the interests of the very AG pipeline this essay has traced. It has resisted calls for an independent prosecutorial authority. It has stayed conspicuously silent through the AGD's most visible failures. It has organized against raising the retirement age — the single reform most likely to loosen the pipeline's grip. It has positioned itself, effectively, as gatekeeper of the very appointments process it should be scrutinizing.
An institution meant to check power cannot also be its alibi. Trying to be both forfeits the right to call itself a guardian of anything.
Every captured system wants you to believe its capture was inevitable — simply what judiciaries are, what power always does to law. It is a lie, and the rest of the world is the evidence against it. Independence is not an accident of character but of recruitment. Look closely at any judiciary that has ever stood against a president, a general, or a mob, and you will find the same pattern: the judge did not rise through the machinery of the state. The judge rose in spite of it.
India is the clearest laboratory for this. Justice H.R. Khanna came from private practice, and in 1976, when every other judge on the bench bent to the Emergency, he alone dissented in ADM Jabalpur — a dissent that cost him the Chief Justiceship but bought India a permanent reminder that law can outlive the government that tries to own it. Justice P.N. Bhagwati, an academic before he was a judge, built Public Interest Litigation almost by force of will, prying open a courtroom door that had been closed to the poor for a century. Justice J.S. Verma wrote the Vishaka guidelines into existence because no legislature would. None of them were bred inside a prosecutor's office. All of them were dangerous to power precisely because power had never trained them.
Pakistan tells the same story under harder conditions. Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry refused a general's demand for resignation in 2007 and, in refusing, ignited a lawyers' movement that reshaped the country's constitutional imagination. Justice Qazi Faez Isa, formed outside the state's patronage networks, has spent a career writing judgments that protect minorities the state would rather forget. Bangladesh's judiciary, for all its own struggles, has produced benches willing to defend secular constitutional order against religious and political pressure alike. Nepal's courts, staffed from academia and private practice rather than a single prosecutorial pipeline, held the line through a monarchy's collapse and a decade of constitutional upheaval.
The pattern only hardens further out. South Africa's Constitutional Court — built deliberately, after apartheid, from human-rights lawyers, academics, and civil-society advocates rather than the old state's legal apparatus — became one of the most fearless courts on earth precisely because its architects understood that a judiciary drawn from the previous regime's machinery would simply be the previous regime, wearing new robes. The United Kingdom draws its bench overwhelmingly from independent barristers and academics with no career debt to the executive. Canada's Supreme Court has been shaped by scholars, Indigenous legal advocates, and civil-rights litigators. Australia's High Court, similarly, has never been a retirement home for government prosecutors.
None of this is coincidence or culture. It is design. A judiciary recruited from the state's own legal machinery will, with mechanical predictability, protect the machinery it came from — not out of corruption, but biography. A judiciary recruited from academia, private practice, and civil society at least carries the possibility of biting the hand that never fed it. Independence, in other words, is not a virtue you can instill after appointment. It has to be built into the bloodstream before the robe ever goes on.
Measured against this pattern, Sri Lanka's AG-dominated bench is not a system that occasionally produces timid judges. It is a system that has never once had the raw material to produce a Khanna, a Chaudhry, or a Verma — because it never recruited from where such judges come from. You cannot harvest independence from a pipeline engineered, generation after generation, to reward its absence.
A machine this deliberate cannot be dismantled by good intentions alone. It requires structural reform: breaking the AG pipeline at its root, raising the retirement age to reduce selective extension, establishing a Judicial Appointments Commission genuinely independent of the executive, mandating public disclosure of appointment criteria, ending acting appointments, and closing the door on post-retirement political reward.
None of this is radical. It is merely what functioning democracies already do. What makes it difficult in Sri Lanka is not its design but its enemies: a deep state built this architecture to protect itself, and a Bar Association that has, whether through complicity or convenience, made itself its most articulate defender.
The Aragalaya uprising cracked the shell of this arrangement — showed a population, briefly, that the machine could be made to shake. What comes next is not political theater but a test of philosophical seriousness: will the mandate for change be spent on rhetoric, or on the unglamorous work of unmaking a pipeline that took fifty years to build?
Sri Lanka's crisis is not an abstraction. It has names, faces, graves. Prageeth Ekneligoda's empty chair. Lasantha Wickrematunge's final words, written to killers who still walk free. Eleven students never returned to their parents. Thousands vanished in the North and East, held now only in photographs their mothers still carry. Batalanda's walls, where torture was practiced and normalized. The Easter Sunday smoke, rising from a catastrophe of intelligence failures too convenient to be entirely accidental. The white-van architects of enforced disappearance, never once required to answer for it in open court. The extortion networks — the drug mafias operating with impunity — that a captured state was too compromised, or too complicit, to dismantle. These are not separate scandals to be filed and forgotten one by one. They are recurring proof of a single, unbroken arrangement: a state in which those most implicated in its gravest crimes retain a hand, direct or indirect, in deciding who is fit to sit in judgment of them.
A system can deny justice through violence, or through procedure — and procedure is crueler, because it lets the guilty call their innocence a verdict. Sri Lanka has spent fifty years perfecting the second method, laundering truth until truth itself became a threat to be managed rather than a fact to be faced. A bench shaped under that kind of pressure does not fail victims by accident. It fails them by design, structurally favorable to the torturer, the terrorist's enabler, the disappearance's architect, and the extortionist who launders his violence as commerce.
This is not fate. It is design — and design can be undone. The people of Sri Lanka have lived long enough inside a system built to protect the powerful and bury the truth. A different future begins with vacancy reform, breaking the AG pipeline, raising the retirement age — no matter how loudly the deep state, or the Bar Association that shields it, protests.
The question was never really about Sri Lanka's courts. It was whether a nation can call itself just while torturers, terrorists' enablers, the architects of disappearance, and the extortion networks that flourished under their protection retain any say — however indirect — in who is permitted to wear the robe. Sri Lanka has answered, for fifty years, by refusing to ask. The refusal is the crime. Asking it, honestly and at last, and answering it with structural reform rather than rhetoric, is the only justice still within reach.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-07-05 14:05:06)
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