-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -17.Aug.2026, 3.10 PM)
"There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience." — Mahatma Gandhi
On 4 November 1981, Sri Lanka's Supreme Court heard a disciplinary case against District Judge C. Amarasinghe. He stood accused of altering a judicial record. The court examined the evidence and found no intent to deceive or falsify anything.
He was innocent. The system said so, in writing.
It did not matter. The damage was already done.
Family recollection places the precipitating act with unusual precision. Amarasinghe had first issued a rule in a matter heard in the absence of a senior attorney, relying on the evidence placed before him by a police witness. When fuller, correct evidence later reached him, he did what conscience required: he suspended his own rule rather than let a wrong order stand uncorrected. A judge revisiting his own decision the moment better evidence arrived should have been unremarkable, even admirable. Instead, it detonated.
In a court culture built around adjournment as the default and delay as where reputations, leverage, and fees were made, a judge who moved fast, reversed himself the instant the facts changed, and refused to let a case drift was not admired. He was resented. His willingness to correct a rule on the strength of new evidence exposed how much of the establishment's ordinary business depended on cases never being revisited, never being closed, never being resolved on their merits alone. For lawyers and officials who had learned to extract value out of a slow, adjournment-tolerant calendar, Amarasinghe's efficiency was not simply unusual. It threatened an economy built on delay — a system in which postponement was not a failure but, for the right people, a fortune quietly made.
He was not interdicted, publicly suspected, and ground down by a culture addicted to delay, precisely because his instinct for fast, no-nonsense justice made him stand out, and standing out made him a target. He resigned at 49, the exact moment he was next in line for the High Court and, on the ordinary path of seniority, within reach of the Supreme Court itself. A judge cleared of wrongdoing never got his career back.
The law said one thing. Life did another.
That gap is where this essay begins.
Judicial independence is usually discussed in constitutional language — security of tenure, protection from removal, appointments kept away from political convenience. Those guarantees matter, but they are only the outer wall.
Governments can control judges through selection, promotion, and tenure extension; a judge who knows his future depends on staying agreeable acts accordingly. Legislatures do not even need to touch a judge directly — resizing courts, controlling budgets, or slipping in an ouster clause achieves the same result without open coercion.
Underneath all of that sits something harder to see capture from inside the judiciary itself. Chief Justices and administrators who control bench assignments can steer sensitive cases toward "reliable" judges. Procedural rules, case-listing tricks, and internal disciplinary panels can stall inconvenient litigation until it stops mattering. A judiciary can be formally independent and functionally captured at once — answering to no other branch of government, while answering perfectly to its own hierarchy, or its own fear.
Conscience is not fixed at birth; it is built over a career, tested and hardened by pressure. A judge with decades on the bench has less to lose from one unpopular ruling, has already survived earlier pressure, and has fewer ambitions still dangling from someone else's goodwill. Younger judges are structurally more exposed — promotion, extension, and elevation still lie ahead of them, which is exactly the leverage point every capture tactic depends on.
That is why age and experience are not a side issue in judicial independence — they are one of its main defences. A bench full of judges early in long, promotion-hungry careers is a bench full of pressure points. A bench anchored by senior judges with nothing left to bargain for is much harder to bend.
A right that cannot be enforced within a reasonable time is not really a right. A court system that cannot deliver timely decisions is, in real terms, unjust, no matter how clean its rules look on paper. Real efficiency rests on three pillars — structure, procedure, and technology — and none of the three builds itself; all three need experienced hands to construct and defend them against the daily pull back toward old habits of delay.
The comparative record backs this up.
The United Kingdom raised its judicial retirement age from 70 to 75 in 2021 to sustain its civil-justice reforms.
Canada lets judges serve to 75 and remains one of the most trusted judiciaries on earth. The Nordic countries allow service to 70–75 and post some of the lowest case backlogs anywhere.
Singapore, under Chief Justice Yong Pung How, created Senior Judges and Judicial Commissioners so experienced judges could keep clearing complex or backlog-heavy cases after formal retirement, paired with aggressive case management and early digitisation. Every one of these reforms treats judicial experience as an asset to keep, not a problem to retire away on a fixed clock.
Sri Lanka has its own recent proof. Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena took office in July 2025 facing 5,326 pending Supreme Court cases; by mid-2026 that backlog had dropped to 3,763 — not through hiring more judges, but through structured case management, five-day sittings, parallel benches, and a national e-Courts project. Discipline and structure, not headcount, cleared the backlog — the same logic that makes experienced, senior judges more valuable, not less.
It is tempting, and politically convenient, to blame court backlog on lazy judges. The record does not back that up. Police fail to produce witnesses or finish investigations on time. The Attorney General's Department sits on indictments for years. Prisons fail to transport accused persons to their own hearings, forcing adjournments through no fault of the bench. Political interference quietly decides which cases move and which stall. A judge can run a tight courtroom and still preside over a system that cannot deliver a witness, a file, or a defendant on time.
The adjournment is where all of this becomes visible in one courtroom moment. Lawyers ask for it to buy time for powerful clients.
Judges, boxed in by procedure and a culture that treats postponement as the safe move, grant it.
Police haven't produced witnesses.
The Attorney General's Department hasn't finished the indictment.
Prison transport failed again.
Bar associations, protecting their own members, resist reforms that would penalise habitual adjournment-seeking.
Each small, individually excusable failure launders into a systemic delay nobody is personally responsible for — and, not coincidentally, benefits the connected litigant who can afford to wait out a case far more comfortably than an ordinary citizen ever could. This is the mechanism worth naming plainly: judicial laundering — delay manufactured by many hands, across many desks, none formally accountable, quietly serving the powerful. Like any laundering operation, it works by fragmentation: no single actor ever produces the whole delay, so no single actor can ever be blamed for it, and the profit — in fees, in leverage, in outcomes bought through time rather than argument — comes out the other end looking perfectly legitimate.
Over time this hardens into culture. Lawyers treat the adjournment as routine strategy, not an exception needing justification. Judges start seeing delay as inevitable rather than a failure worth fighting. Litigants show up expecting their case to last decades. The public, having never seen anything different, concludes courts are just naturally slow — a belief that quietly excuses everyone. Delay stops being a scandal and becomes weather: something you plan around instead of demand fixed.
None of this lives inside one institution. It plays out across a fractured landscape of overlapping authorities:
the Police,
the Attorney General's Department,
the Prisons Department,
the Judicial Service Commission,
the Ministry of Justice,
the Bar Association,
Parliament, and
the Executive Presidency.
Each has its own incentives, timeline, and constituency — and none is accountable for the delay their combined failures produce. Spread responsibility across eight institutions and no single actor can be blamed, and no single reform can fix it. That is exactly why backlog has proven so durable, and why those who benefit from delay have little reason to consolidate the system that protects them.
For an establishment whose standing depends on this machinery, judicial reform is not incremental policy — it is existential. Every efficient judge, every cleared backlog, every case resolved on schedule instead of drifting for a decade removes a lever of control. That is why fights over the judiciary so often read less like ordinary disagreement and more like a zero-sum contest, fought by people who experience it as a matter of survival: keep the machinery of delay intact, or lose the leverage it provides.
For the elite, it is a do-or-die game.
Zoom out from that game, though, and the picture changes entirely. Sri Lanka's courts are sitting on more than 1.1 million pending cases. Behind each file is a person: a tenant waiting years for a ruling, a small trader with capital frozen in litigation, a family unable to settle a dispute over land, an accused person who has already spent more time in remand than any eventual sentence would allow. For the elite, judicial reform is a contest over who controls the bench. For everyone else it is a much narrower question — whether a court, in any meaningful sense, exists for them at all.
A judiciary can be independent on paper and functionally absent in fact if it cannot resolve a dispute within a lifetime.
Where the backlog is measured in the millions, access to justice is not a slogan; it is a test the system is currently failing at scale, while the argument above the docket is about who gets to hold the levers.
Structures and cultures act on people, but people are where justice actually gets decided. A judge's conscience works on several levels at once: an epistemic duty to rule on fact and law, not convenient fiction; a moral duty to ask whether legality and justice have quietly split apart; an institutional duty to remember the office guards the legal order, not whoever currently holds power; and a procedural duty to fairness in how a case is decided, not just what is decided.
Gandhi called conscience a higher court than any court of law. That is not a nice phrase — it describes the only real backstop against judicial capture, because every structural safeguard, from tenure to appointment procedure, only works if the person inside it is still willing to say no.
Former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva later admitted his own court's ruling had cleared the path to a presidency.
Former President Maithripala Sirisena described a sitting Chief Justice offering, unprompted, to rule according to presidential wishes in exchange for his post.
Against that, Neville Samarakoon confronted an assertive executive presidency and faced impeachment for it, and Shirani Bandaranayake was removed after rulings that displeased the government of the day. Both prove conscience can still refuse to bend, even when bending is the safer move.
In 1981, under J. R. Jayewardene's assertive executive presidency, the Supreme Court examined the allegation against Amarasinghe and found no dishonesty in him. That was the system working exactly as designed: fact tested against law, and the accused judge cleared. But institutional conscience and institutional protection are not the same thing. The court could clear a man's name and still fail to shield his career from the machinery surrounding it — the suspicion, the elite pressure, the delay-tolerant culture that made his efficiency conspicuous, and a legal establishment more comfortable with a slow, cautious judge than a capable, impatient one.
His retirement at 49 was not a resignation in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a socially engineered exit — pressure applied without a single formal charge ever succeeding against him, applied instead through cold shoulders, stalled goodwill, and quiet suspicion, until leaving was the only bearable option left. That is what elite capture looks like when it does not need a court order: it needs only enough friction to make staying unbearable.
The institution did not have to remove Amarasinghe. It only had to make sure he removed himself. The result was identical either way — independence, experience, and efficiency, sacrificed together, dressed up afterward as one man's personal choice.
He deserves the plain conclusion his case earns: he was not destroyed by a legal finding, because no such finding ever existed against him. He was destroyed by everything this essay has described — fragmentation without accountability, an adjournment culture that had become someone's fortune, elite discomfort with efficiency, and a system too diffuse for any single actor to be held responsible.
Against this history, the argument now heard from parts of Sri Lanka's legal elite — that keeping senior judges on the bench threatens judicial independence — should be seen for what it is. The evidence points the other way: the UK, Canada, the Nordic states, and Singapore's Senior Judge model all treat experience and tenure as a wall against capture, not a door into it. It is the young, promotion-hungry judge who is structurally exposed to pressure, not the senior judge with nothing left to negotiate for.
Sri Lanka is once again locked in a fierce debate over judicial tenure. In 2026, the government proposed extending Supreme Court judges' retirement age from 65 to 67 to tackle over 1.1 million pending cases. Critics—including the Bar Association, opposition parties—dubbed it the "Surasena Amendment." They argue it specifically benefits Chief Justice Padman Surasena, who is set to retire in December after slashing the court’s backlog by nearly a third in under a year.
While the government denies targeting individuals, the Bar “overwhelmingly” voted to reject the change as unethical. Echoing a pattern last seen in 1981, Sri Lanka’s legal establishment is again divided over prioritizing judicial continuity or strict tenure rules.
Amarasinghe was pushed out early, at 49, through pressure no charge could justify.
Surasena, if the retirement age holds where it stands, will be walked out on time, at 65, through a deadline no reform can outrun.
The mechanisms differ. The outcome does not: an independent, experienced, efficient judge, unmade not by any finding of wrongdoing, but by an establishment that has never needed one.
Independence, efficiency, and conscience are not three separate reform projects. They are three names for one requirement: a judiciary secure enough to decide cases on fact and law instead of fear, and fast enough that a ruling still matters by the time it arrives. Sri Lanka's own backlog reduction — twice now, forty-five years apart, under two different judges — proves that structure and discipline, not headcount and not fear, are what actually move a caseload.
The honest response is not nostalgia; it is design: a judiciary built to keep its most conscientious and capable judges instead of burning them out or timing them out, and a legal culture finally willing to treat delay, and the fortunes quietly made from it, as the injustice it has always been.
That is the only court that would ever have been safe for a judge like Amarasinghe — or, forty-five years later, for a judge like Surasena: independent, conscious, and efficient, all at once.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-08-17 09:43:14)
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