-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -2026.July.14, 11.10 PM)
“Justice in the life of the nation is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” -Plato
“There is a higher court than courts of justice, and that is the court of conscience.” -Mahatma Gandhi
“The mission of judges is to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.” -Alexander Hamilton
“The silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most has made it possible for evil to triumph.” -Haile Selassie
On July 11, 2026, Colombo Fort Magistrate Pasan Amarasena resigned as President of the Judicial Service Association, accusing its secretary and executive committee of a "regrettable and shameless attempt" to ram through a resolution on judges' retirement age without a quorum, while "supporting parties opposed to extending the judges' retirement age" and other political agendas he refused to be party to. Sri Lankan media ran the story as chaos — a court on fire. But Amarasena's letter was never the fire. It was a single match struck inside a building that has been smouldering for forty-eight years. To understand why one magistrate's resignation could dominate a news cycle, you have to look at the accelerant already soaked into the floorboards: a judiciary rebuilt, purged, and repurposed by every administration since 1978, one amendment and one appointment at a time.
When J.R. Jayewardene introduced the 1978 Constitution, he did not simply create a powerful executive presidency — he reconstituted the Supreme Court itself. Twelve sitting judges were removed or demoted in a single stroke, seniority was shattered, and institutional memory was amputated overnight. Judges who sat on Special Presidential Commissions targeting political opponents were fast-tracked for promotion; loyalty became a currency with a fixed exchange rate.
The 17th Amendment of 2001 created the Constitutional Council and briefly restored merit-based appointments, but it depended on political cooperation that evaporated the moment it became inconvenient.
Mahinda Rajapaksa's 18th Amendment in 2010 abolished the Council outright, handing appointments back to unchecked presidential discretion.
The 19th Amendment restored the Council in 2015 under the Yahapalana government, but the culture of obedience survived the structural fix untouched.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa's 20th Amendment in 2020 went further than any before it: it gutted the Council into a non-binding Parliamentary observer and simultaneously expanded the Supreme Court from eleven judges to seventeen and the Court of Appeal from twelve to twenty — an internationally recognized court-packing maneuver, diluting independent voices by simple arithmetic.
The 21st Amendment of 2022 restored the Council once more under Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose own administration then openly defied a Supreme Court stay order on an IGP appointment, proving that restored procedure without restored culture is theatre.
Each rewrite carried names attached to it.
Jayewardene's 1978 purge removed judges who had built careers under the Soulbury and 1972 constitutions, replacing institutional memory with obedience almost overnight.
Rajapaksa's 18th Amendment, passed in September 2010 with a two-thirds majority manufactured through defections, also abolished the presidential two-term limit in the same stroke — judicial capture and executive permanence arriving as a single legislative package.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa's 20th Amendment, rushed through in October 2020 barely a year into his presidency, drew objections from the Bar Association of Sri Lanka and civil society groups who warned explicitly that expanding the bench from eleven judges to seventeen, and the Court of Appeal from twelve to twenty, existed for one purpose: to make room for loyalists faster than attrition could remove independents.
Wickremesinghe's defiance of the Supreme Court's stay order on the IGP appointment came within months of the 21st Amendment's passage in October 2022, leaving no room to claim the old habits had simply been forgotten.
Six constitutions, one pattern: purge, expand, bypass, politicize, restore, capture again.
Structure explains the machinery; personnel explain the damage.
Justice Shanthi Eva Wanasundera's Law College friendship with Mahinda Rajapaksa followed her onto the bench during the 2018 constitutional crisis, when she sat on panels hearing challenges to the president's attempt to dissolve parliament and install Rajapaksa as prime minister without a floor vote — a proximity that drew open objections from lawyers over her impartiality.
Priyantha Jayawardena leapt from private practice directly to the Supreme Court in 2014 — bypassing senior career judges who had waited years in line — two years after Rajapaksa made him a President's Counsel and placed him on several state boards, a promotion the Bar Association of Sri Lanka publicly condemned as a breach of seniority norms.
In the Trial-at-Bar of General Sarath Fonseka, Rajapaksa's defeated 2010 presidential rival, a three-judge panel convicted him on charges tied to military procurement; Justice Deepali Wijesundera joined the majority, while fellow judge W.T.M.P.B. Warawewa filed a scathing dissent, fully acquitting Fonseka and calling the prosecution's evidence unreliable. Wijesundera's subsequent promotions were widely read across the legal community as political compensation for a conviction the government badly needed.
No appointment illustrates capture more starkly than Mohan Peiris, installed as Chief Justice in January 2013, immediately after Shirani Bandaranayake's impeachment. As Attorney General under the same administration, Peiris had withdrawn cases against government allies and defended the state in politically charged litigation; as Chief Justice, he became the executive's legal shield, a role the Supreme Court itself later implicitly rejected when it ruled his appointment unconstitutional in 2015 and reinstated Bandaranayake, however briefly and symbolically. President Maithripala Sirisena, who had by then broken with the Rajapaksa camp, later recounted publicly that Peiris came to see him late one evening and told him plainly, "he would deliver his judgments according to my wishes."
Former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva, who presided over the court during the pivotal 2005 election-law disputes, later admitted, "Mahinda Rajapaksa was freed to become president because of this decision," acknowledging that his own court's ruling had reshaped a presidential race years before Rajapaksa ever took office.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, long before he became president himself, distilled the public's verdict on the whole system into one line: Sri Lankans no longer wait for a ruling, he said, because "by looking at the faces of the judges, we know the verdict."
When political engineering fails, cruder tools appear. In 2012, Judge Manjula Thilakarathna, Secretary of the Judicial Service Commission, was physically attacked by unidentified men outside his own office — an assault that triggered nationwide protests by judges and lawyers and produced not a single conviction, despite promises of investigation from the then government.
In January 2013, Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake was impeached by a parliamentary select committee after ruling against the Divineguma Bill, in a process the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal both later declared illegal — a public humiliation engineered to teach every judge watching that conscience carries a cost, delivered within days of the ruling that provoked it.
In 1997, Reginald Sylvester Vincent Fernando, a witness scheduled to testify against powerful figures in the Batalanda torture camp inquiry led by a presidential commission, was assassinated days before he could take the stand, severing the evidentiary link between investigators and the political network they were closing in on — a killing that to this day remains unresolved.
In 2018, when CID investigators Nishantha Silva and Shani Abeysekara moved against elite networks tied to unresolved assassinations and disappearances, the executive triggered a 52-day constitutional coup — the October 2018 attempt to replace the sitting prime minister without a parliamentary vote — that froze the CID's command structure, reassigned key officers, and halted indictments outright until the courts forced a reversal.
Killing witnesses is messy and leaves evidence, so the deep state adapted. It now kills time instead: delaying hearings, stalling indictments, and quietly adjusting retirement ages so that independent judges age out of their seats before delivering a final verdict. The calendar has replaced the gun.
Judicial associations, built for pensions and welfare, have been hijacked into political instruments before, and the pattern is old enough to have a name in comparative law: association capture.
Egypt's Judges' Club, historically a bastion of judicial independence, was mobilized by government-aligned factions after 2013 to discipline judges who resisted the post-Morsi political order.
Guatemala's Association of Judges and Magistrates has repeatedly filed disciplinary complaints against members of the country's own anti-corruption courts, including judges who presided over cases tied to the CICIG commission, rather than defending their independence.
Turkey's Unity in Judiciary Association, founded in 2014, openly campaigned for government-aligned candidates in judicial council elections and was accused by opposition lawyers of distributing welfare benefits and housing assistance as leverage over undecided members.
In the United States, dark-money groups organized as tax-exempt "social welfare" nonprofits have spent tens of millions of dollars on state supreme court elections since the 2000s, all without disclosing a single donor. The common thread across four continents and five decades is identical: an institution built to protect judges gets turned into an institution that disciplines them instead, and it happens with none of the visibility a constitutional amendment or an impeachment vote would attract.
This is the pattern Pasan Amarasena says he watched land inside the JSA in July 2026: an executive committee allegedly forcing a vote without quorum, altering minutes, and manufacturing a resolution on judges' retirement age to present as the unified voice of the bench. He resigned rather than sign off on it; the resolution passed anyway, days later, at Kaduwela. The details of that single meeting matter less than what it proves — that Sri Lanka's deep state no longer needs death squads. It needs a resolution, a press release, and the phrase "collective judicial opinion."
If Sri Lanka's judiciary has a real constitution, it is not printed — it runs along five fault lines that determine whether a judge becomes a guardian or an instrument, and every judge named in this essay sits somewhere on each of them.
Epistemic conscience is the duty to truth: basing decisions on reliable fact and valid reasoning rather than manufactured evidence, coerced confessions, or "official truths" handed down from above. Captured judges accept the narrative they are given and stop asking where the evidence came from; resisting judges demand the paper trail even when producing it is inconvenient for the state.
Moral conscience is the duty to justice: the inner refusal to legitimize cruelty or inequality no matter how carefully the law has been worded around it. Captured judges tailor judgments to political wishes and call it interpretation; resisting judges protect the vulnerable regardless of who is watching from the gallery or reading the verdict from Temple Trees.
Institutional conscience is the duty to the office itself — the understanding that a judge guards the constitutional order rather than serves whichever government currently controls appointments and promotions. Captured judges negotiate rulings for job security, the way Mohan Peiris is alleged to have done; resisting judges defend the separation of powers even when it costs them their next promotion, or their office outright, the way Bandaranayake did.
Temporal conscience is the duty to history: awareness that today's ruling becomes tomorrow's doctrine and next generation's precedent. Captured judges think about tenure, pension, and the next elevation; resisting judges think about how a ruling will read fifty years later, once the political pressure that produced it has been forgotten by everyone except the historians.
Procedural conscience is the duty to fairness itself — hearing both sides, giving reasons, recusing when necessary, and refusing falsified minutes or predetermined outcomes, whether inside a courtroom or inside a professional association's own executive committee.
These five axes are not abstractions. They have names attached to them.
Neville Samarakoon held the institutional line against J.R. Jayewardene as Chief Justice in the early 1980s and survived an impeachment attempt for it, becoming the first modern proof that the office could outlast the president who wanted to control it.
Shirani Bandaranayake held the moral and institutional line against the Rajapaksa administration and was removed from office for it in 2013, becoming less a casualty than a symbol invoked by every subsequent generation of law students.
Preethi Padman Surasena represents the quieter register of conscience — the unglamorous, everyday fidelity to doctrine that never makes headlines but keeps the machinery of law from rotting from the inside, one unremarkable, uncorrupted judgment at a time.
Pasan Amarasena's July 2026 resignation, whatever its ultimate outcome, sits on the procedural line: a refusal to let disputed minutes and a contested quorum stand in his name. Different fires, different decades, same fuel — the willingness to say no when saying yes would have cost nothing but a signature.
Forty-eight years of purges, court-packing, assassinated witnesses, impeached chief justices, and hijacked associations have produced one durable truth: Sri Lanka's executive can rewrite the constitution as many times as it likes, expand the bench, shrink the bench, freeze the CID, and buy a chief justice's late-night promise — but it has never once rewritten conscience. It has tried everything else first.
It bought loyalty with promotions.
It punished dissent with impeachment.
When neither worked, it sent men to break bones outside a judge's office or pull a trigger on a witness three days before he could testify.
And still there is a Samarakoon, a Bandaranayake, a Surasena, a name out of Kaduwela this July — someone standing in a chamber somewhere, refusing to hand over the one thing no constitutional amendment, no court-packing bill, no manufactured resolution has ever managed to touch.
This is not a story that ends, and it was never supposed to be comfortable. It is a fire that has been burning since 1978 — banked low in some decades, roaring in others, choking on its own smoke in the years between amendments — and it will keep burning for as long as there is a bench worth capturing and a president willing to try.
The untouchables have had forty-eight years to perfect the art of impunity, and they are very, very good at it. But they have never once figured out how to extinguish the one variable they cannot legislate, cannot promote, and cannot silence with a resolution:
a single judge, alone, deciding that this is the day he burns the whole arrangement down rather than sign his name to it.
Sri Lanka has run out of patience for the ones who chose comfort.
The fire is still burning. It is waiting for the next name.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-07-14 17:44:30)
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