-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -2026.July.11, 4.00 AM)
"Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should not add to them the deformity of vice." - Cicero
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton
"It is not by natural disasters alone that the country can be devastated and destroyed... but also by a bad judiciary." - Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena, Sri Lanka Judges' Institute, July 2026
Two hundred and sixty-nine people did not die of natural causes on an Easter morning in 2019. They died because a state apparatus, warned in writing, chose silence over sirens. Journalists did not vanish into thin air; they were made to vanish by hands that knew exactly what they were erasing. Lawyers who asked where the bodies were buried did not retire quietly into old age; some were buried themselves, in silence, in unmarked time. This is Sri Lanka's ledger, and it has never been closed.
A society that cannot punish its untouchables has not achieved peace. It has achieved paralysis dressed as order. And a judiciary that expels its bravest members the moment their courage matures into danger is not an independent judiciary. It is a scaffold built to look like a temple.
This is the story of a country that engineered forgetting into its Constitution — and of the handful of judges who, for one brief historical instant, refused to forget.
Every impunity regime needs three things: a pipeline that produces loyal officials, a guild that defends the guilty as a professional courtesy, and a clock that removes the honest before their honesty becomes dangerous. Sri Lanka's 1978 Constitution supplied all three.
It borrowed Westminster's legislature, an executive modelled on Washington and Paris, and a judicial machine tuned to Singapore — a hybrid built not for justice but capture. The Attorney General's Department became the pipeline into the bench. The Bar Association became the shield around power. And the retirement clock became the weapon, discharging judges precisely when their independence stops being negotiable.
There is no philosophy in the number sixty-five. There is only arithmetic weaponized against conscience. A judge is declared trustworthy until that birthday and untrustworthy the day after — not because wisdom expires, but because by then a judge has usually stopped needing the patronage that kept him obedient. The Constitution does not retire judges. It disposes of them, right on schedule, the moment they become unbuyable.
Ask the mothers of Easter Sunday's dead whether that schedule ever served them. Ask the family of a murdered editor whether the clock ever ticked in their favour. Ask the relatives of the disappeared, still waiting for a name or an admission, whether Sri Lanka's institutions were built to remember them, or only to outlast them.
Then came the uprising. For a short season, judges stopped flinching. The 2022 Aragalaya cracked open a door the architecture of 1978 had welded shut, and through it walked judges who ruled as though the law meant something — as though a dead journalist's blood, a disappeared lawyer's absence, and 269 unclaimed lives at Easter deserved more than a diplomatic paragraph in a report no one enforces.
And the system did what these systems always do: it did not fight the judges. It waited them out. It did not need to impeach the guardians of conscience — only a calendar. The clock struck sixty-five, and one by one, the men who found courage were expelled the moment that courage became institutionally unshakeable.
This is a judiciary that punishes its own wisdom. Not with malice, not with visible violence — with paperwork. With administrative silence. With the quiet, bureaucratic elegance of a system that has learned it does not need to kill its conscience. It only needs to wait for it to turn sixty-five.
Before the argument proceeds, two facts must be set straight, because the deep state thrives on confusion between them.
First: Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena is not a placeholder awaiting replacement. He is the Judicial Service Commission itself — appointed to it in January 2025, made its chairman the day he became Chief Justice in July 2025. He is positioned to explain, to the President and the public, exactly why senior Court of Appeal judges have retired into vacancies never filled above them. He is not merely the reformer. He is the record-keeper of the reform's obstruction.
Second: Justice Yasantha Kodagoda is not a rival circling the throne. He is dismantling the system's other diseased organ — chairing the Technical Expert Committee tasked, since Cabinet's May 2025 approval, with drafting legislation for an independent Office of the Public Prosecutor, separate from the Attorney General's Department. This answers the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights' 2024 finding that the AG's dual role — prosecuting the state's enemies while defending its officials — is a conflict of interest that makes accountability, for Easter Sunday and every disappearance before it, functionally impossible.
These two men are not competing for a chair. One repairs the pipeline of appointments from within the JSC; the other dismantles the AG's monopoly from within a UN-mandated reform. Extending the retirement age silences neither man. It only decides who is still standing when both reforms are finished.
A judiciary is not independent because a document declares it so. Independence is a condition of mind. Capture is a condition of design. The 1978 Constitution built a judiciary formally free and structurally captive — mistaken for balance for nearly five decades.
An independent judge possesses four autonomies. Epistemic: ruling on evidence and law rather than intelligence briefings dressed as certainty. Moral: convicting the powerful without flinching at the cost. Temporal: a career no longer hostage to a calendar weaponized against conscience. Institutional: distance from an Attorney General's Department that trains judges in loyalty before it trains them in law.
A captured judge inherits the mirror image of each — epistemic dependency, mistaking the state's narrative for truth; moral dependency, mistaking obedience for virtue; temporal dependency, weighing every ruling against a pension or a promotion; institutional dependency, shaped by the very pipeline he will one day be asked to judge.
Independence is justice governing power. Capture is power governing justice. Sri Lanka built a judiciary trained, elevated, and retired by the state the instant it grew dangerous to the state. This is not incompetent design. It is design that works exactly as intended — the more damning verdict of the two.
No discussion of judicial courage in Sri Lanka is honest if it omits the dead who never received a verdict. A newspaper editor murdered in daylight after naming the powerful. A cartoonist who vanished into a van and was never seen again. Journalists threatened into silence or exile, their bylines erased with their safety. Lawyers who took cases against the state and found themselves harassed, surveilled, or gone. Two hundred and sixty-nine people killed on Easter Sunday 2019 in attack intelligence services were warned about, in writing, and did nothing to stop.
These are not separate tragedies. They are chapters of one continuous crime: the manufacture of untouchability. An untouchable is not a person who has done no wrong — it is a person the system has decided it will never be permitted to judge. Sri Lanka has manufactured untouchables for decades: through the AG pipeline that trains prosecutors to protect rather than pursue, through a Bar culture that treats defending the powerful as a badge of seniority, and through a clock that removes any judge who forgets his place.
Justice delayed for the Easter Sunday dead is not merely slow. It is instructive. It teaches every future killer, every future silencer of journalists, every future author of a disappearance, that state machinery will outlast the grief of its victims. That lesson is what Sri Lanka's institutions have manufactured for fifty years, far more efficiently than they have manufactured verdicts.
Easter Sunday negligence (SCFR 163/19 etc.), 12 Jan 2023
* Against: Sirisena, Jayasundara, Hemasiri Fernando, others
* Bench: Jayasuriya, Aluwihare, Dehideniya, Murdu Fernando, Thurairaja, Nawaz, Gooneratne
* Retired at 65?: Jayasuriya; Aluwihare (Jan 2024); Fernando (Jul 2025); Thurairaja (Mar 2026); others unconfirmed
Economic mismanagement (SC/FRA/212/2022), 14 Nov 2023
* Against: Gotabaya, Mahinda, Basil, Sabry, Cabraal, Lakshman, Jayasundera, Attygalle
* Bench: Jayasuriya, Aluwihare, Jayawardena (dissent), Malalgoda, Murdu Fernando
* Retired at 65?: Jayasuriya; Aluwihare; Jayawardena (Feb 2024); Fernando; Malalgoda unconfirmed
Emergency regulations / Aragalaya dispersal (Satkunanathan v AG), 23 Jul 2025
* Against: Ranil Wickremesinghe
* Bench: Murdu Fernando, Kodagoda (majority), Obeysekera (dissent)
* Retired at 65?: Fernando retired; Kodagoda and Obeysekera still sitting
Five of the nine judges who ruled against three presidents and a prime minister have already been expelled by arithmetic. Nobody impeached them. Nobody accused them of error. The calendar did what no political actor wished to be seen doing. They were retired for courage, and the state did not even need to raise its voice.
* UK — Supreme Court: 0% of apex judges from AG/prosecutor background
* Canada — Supreme Court: 0%
* Pakistan — Supreme Court: 0%
* Bangladesh — Appellate Division: 0%
* Australia — High Court: 0% (14% including Solicitor-General)
* India — Supreme Court: ~6%
* South Africa — Constitutional Court: ~9%
* Sri Lanka — Supreme Court: ~30–50%
* Singapore — Court of Appeal: 33–67%
* China / Vietnam / Russia — Apex courts: top leadership post only
Sri Lanka sits beside Singapore in a bracket no genuine democracy should envy — a system where the Attorney General's Department is the primary training ground for the apex bench. When a third to a half of the highest judges in the land spent their formative decades defending the state they will later be asked to judge, the phrase "judicial independence" stops being a description and becomes a euphemism.
The Bar Association of Sri Lanka frames its opposition to raising the retirement age as a defense of judicial independence. Examine it closely and it defends something else entirely: continuity for the untouchable.
* Position: Opposes raising the SC/CA retirement age. Effect: Forces out the Chief Justice mid-reform, regardless of institutional cost.
* Position: Aligned with the AG's Department's monopoly on prosecution. Effect: Slows Kodagoda's reform designed to dismantle that conflict.
Senior lawyers built entire careers navigating the AG's Department. That is not an accusation; it is a structural incentive, and incentives explain behaviour better than principle ever does. When the same voice that stays silent on dismantling the AG's monopoly suddenly finds urgency the moment judicial tenure is threatened, the "independence" framing deserves cross-examination, not deference.
The spectacle of a hundred lawyers appearing on behalf of former untouchables is not legal representation. It is theatre performed for an audience of one: the bench itself. It is intimidation wearing the robes of solidarity — proof the deep state still has muscle, and that muscle can still fill a courtroom on command. Judges know exactly what it means when their own guild mocks them in public and stages outrage at reforms threatening the AG's monopoly. This is not advocacy. It is choreography, and everyone in the room knows the music.
The government has already announced — publicly, repeatedly — constitutional amendments aimed at dismantling the architecture that enabled fifty years of judicial capture: removing the executive presidency, establishing an independent public prosecutor's office, creating a parliamentary ombudsman with investigative teeth, and restructuring the Attorney General's conflicted mandate.
These are declared reforms. They are being drafted. They are being built.
And yet BASL's sudden theatrical panic attaches to none of them. It attaches to exactly one issue: the retirement age — the one reform the government has not even formally proposed. This selective terror is more honest than any argument BASL has made in its own defence. A guild that fears an unannounced reform more than the dismantling of the entire capture architecture is not afraid of policy. It is afraid of particular men remaining in particular chairs.
As Seneca warned, we suffer more from imagination than from reality, and are frightened more often than we are hurt. As Montaigne wrote, the greatest achievement in the world is learning to belong to oneself.
BASL is not frightened by a policy. It is frightened by a judiciary that has finally learned how to belong to itself, and that no longer needs the guild's permission to remember the dead.
The fear is arithmetic and simple. If the existing judges stay, the deep state cannot return. If they stay, the AG pipeline cannot launder impunity into precedent again. If they stay, the untouchables never become untouchable again — not the negligent, not the disappearing, not the men who let 269 people die and called it intelligence failure rather than crime.
The panic is the confession. It reveals who feared exposure. It reveals who benefited from the old design. It reveals, more precisely than any tribunal could, who is guilty and who is merely uncomfortable.
As Kierkegaard wrote, the tyrant's rule ends with his death, but the martyr's rule begins with it. The judges who ruled against power did not seek martyrdom. The Constitution manufactured it for them, on schedule, at sixty-five. The deep state fears their continued presence more than any amendment yet drafted — amendments can be delayed, diluted, litigated into irrelevance. A judge already proven incorruptible cannot be un-proven. He can only be removed. And removal, in Sri Lanka, has always worn the disguise of retirement.
Independence without permanence is a performance, not a principle. A judiciary that loses its bravest members to a calendar has not retired them — it has amputated itself, one honest hand at a time, and called the wound routine maintenance.
Minister Harshana Nanayakkara's assurances — that hearings will not stop, that judgments will come, that government has not rushed into changes — read as confidence, not passivity. But confidence is not protection. A government that promises judicial independence and does nothing to shield judges from structural punishment is not honouring that promise. It is postponing its betrayal.
A government that promises accountability for Easter Sunday's dead, for the disappeared, for the journalists silenced and the lawyers who paid for their persistence, must ensure the judges capable of delivering that accountability are not expelled by the very calendar the old Constitution weaponized against them.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Juvenal asked — who will guard the guardians themselves?
Sri Lanka's answer, for fifty years, has been nobody. The system simply retires its guardians before their vigilance becomes inconvenient, and calls the retirement neutral, administrative, apolitical — a lie so well dressed it has never needed to defend itself in court.
Let this be said plainly, without the courtesy diplomacy affords the powerful: justice for the Easter Sunday dead, the disappeared, the murdered and silenced, is not a sentiment for anniversaries. It is a debt, and debts are not paid by institutions that keep discharging their most honest officers on schedule.
Fix the clock.
Finish the reforms.
Let the judges who survived capture long enough to become incorruptible remain long enough to finish what their survival made possible.
Anything less is the untouchables, filing quietly back into the seats the calendar so conveniently emptied for them.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-07-10 22:35:14)
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