By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -18.Aug.2026, 11.50 PM) There is a moment in the President's meeting with the Bar Association of Sri Lanka that should be read slowly, because it is doing more philosophical work than the room may have realized. Asked, in effect, to defend a constitutional amendment that raises the retirement age of judges, the President did not reach for a legal citation. He reached for a nose.
“ What does this 'fragrance' signify? People don't place their trust today because of the best fragrance. Do they trust this judicial system today solely on the basis of fragrant factors? No. The judicial system hasn't had a journey marked by the finest fragrance — plenty of non-fragrant things have occurred.
Yet people still trust this judicial system. “
There exists a documentary record that makes this remark impossible to read as mere rhetoric: The Silence in the Court, a transcript built from a human rights lawyer's testimony, a Judicial Service Commission finding, and an Attorney General's own written words. It is the case study this essay is built on. The issue was documented in an official file years before anyone in that room used the word "fragrance."
It is an odd thing to say about an institution — that it smells, and that people trust it anyway. But it is also the only honest thing that can be said about any institution built by human beings. Trust was never a matter of scent. It was always a matter of function under pressure. And Sri Lanka's judiciary has, this year, been tested precisely there — under pressure, from the executive itself — and it has not folded.
To understand what "non-fragrant" means in the Sri Lankan judicial memory, you do not need a metaphor. You need a file. It is the file of Magistrate Lenin Rathnayake.
Strip away the euphemism and read what the Judicial Service Commission actually found: a sitting magistrate, guilty of the fundamental charges against him — sexual relations with a woman named Jayantha Gunawardhana Manike inside his own judicial chambers, another encounter involving the display of a firearm, sexual intercourse with the wife of a man he had remanded into custody, and financial fraud. Not innuendo. Not "perception." A magistrate using the coercive power of the bench — remand, liberty, fear — as a hunting ground against two women in his path.
Here is the part that should unsettle anyone reaching for the word "independence" as a sacred shield: when the Attorney General of the day, Sarath N. Silva, was asked to authorize a criminal investigation into these findings, his written response declined to advise the CID to investigate at all. The man who would go on to become Chief Justice — head of the very Judicial Service Commission responsible for policing judges — first used the power of his office to shelter one.
This is what "judicial independence" can look like when it curdles: a woman remanded into terror because her husband was accused of a crime, then delivered into the chambers of the man who held both their liberties in his hand. A husband so consumed by the injustice done to his wife that he broke a parcel of his own feces open in a cell and hurled it — not at an abstraction, but at the magistrate, the lawyer, the registrar, the police, at every face in that room that had let it happen. He missed the judge. He hit the fan.
That is not a metaphor. That is the literal image this country's judicial history has on record: excrement thrown at a ceiling fan in a courtroom, because a citizen had run out of every legal remedy and had nothing left but his own body's contents to register the scale of his rage. If you want to know what "the stink of the judicial system" means, it does not mean two extra years on a pension clock. It means that.
So when the BASL raises the alarm today about the fragrance of judicial reform, the serious question is not whether they are wrong to care about optics. It is: where was this fragrance, this exquisite nasal sensitivity, when two actual women were harmed by an actual magistrate, and the crime was buried by an actual Attorney General who went on to run the institution meant to discipline the man who did it?
The stool pit was real. And BASL's predecessors in that same profession did not organize a press conference about it with anything like this urgency.
The President's argument, stripped of its floral language, is closer to an empirical claim than a rhetorical one. He was not asking BASL to trust a smell. He was pointing at a record — and the record, read name by name, is harder to dismiss than the metaphor.
In 2018, Chief Justice Nalin Perera delivered the unanimous seven-judge verdict declaring President Sirisena's dissolution of Parliament unconstitutional — stopping Sirisena's attempt to force through Mahinda Rajapaksa's return outside the normal democratic process.
Five years later, Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya, sitting with Justice Murdu Fernando among others, led the five-judge bench that found Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Basil Rajapaksa had violated the public trust in the mismanagement that bankrupted the country — the same bench that had already barred the Rajapaksas from leaving the island while the case was heard. It was that same Jayasuriya who, in 2024, held President Ranil Wickremesinghe personally responsible for violating voters' fundamental rights by starving local elections of funding, a ruling that saw a sitting president publicly accuse the Court of "judicial cannibalism."
Then, under Chief Justice Murdu Fernando, the Court went further, declaring Wickremesinghe's 2022 state of emergency against the Aragalaya protesters unconstitutional.
Four presidents — Sirisena, the Rajapaksa family, and Wickremesinghe — were held to account by name, by judges who served across every one of those administrations. That is not what a captured court does. Captured courts do not need retirement-age amendments to be controlled; they are already controlled, quietly, through appointments and fear, none of which this amendment touches.
So ask the only question that matters: does anyone seriously believe judges with this record — who have already ruled against Ranil, Mahinda, Gotabaya, and Sirisena, at real political cost — would suddenly bend the knee to Anura Kumara Dissanayake over two extra years on the bench?
A conscience that survived four presidencies does not rent itself out for a pension extension.
That very record is what the amendment proposes to keep in place a little longer, rather than discard at the exact moment the country needs it proven again —
the same judiciary that has since cleaned up the stool pit men like Sarath N. Silva and Lenin Rathnayake once left behind.
If the claim on the table is that today's judiciary answers to itself rather than to the fragrance BASL keeps sniffing for, the same institution has spent the past year producing a record of that self-policing, not a slogan for it. In August 2025, under the Judicial Service Commission chaired by Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena, the JSC was reported to be considering disciplinary action against roughly 30 magistrates and district judges over public complaints, and had already interdicted five that week alone, including a district judge and an additional district judge, plus three recent recruits.
The clean-up did not stop at consideration. By November 2025, the Sunday Times reported that twenty judicial officers -- including a High Court judge, magistrates and district judges -- had been removed from duty: seven terminated outright, the rest interdicted or eased into compulsory retirement. The High Court judge among them was placed before a formal inquiry conducted by Supreme Court Justice Janaka de Silva. One magistrate faced findings of having ruled in favour of her own husband. Officers facing serious charges, corruption among them, were served charge sheets and put through inquiry before the JSC itself decided whether to remove them -- the same commission, doing to its own what Sarath N. Silva once declined to do to Lenin Rathnayake.
Under Surasena, the pattern has inverted: complaints are investigated, charge sheets are issued, inquiries are held before named Supreme Court judges, and officers found wanting are terminated, interdicted, or retired out -- in months, in the open, reported by the same newspapers that once had to wait years to learn what had been buried.
So return to the President's question and let it cut both ways. What is BASL's fragrance in this? An institution that produced no argument beyond atmosphere — no statute, no removal mechanism, no leverage point, nothing but "suspicion" and "perception" — is asking the country to distrust a bench that has shown its spine four times over, on the strength of a smell it cannot name. Meanwhile, the actual stink in this judiciary's history — a magistrate's chambers turned into a place of assault, an Attorney General who chose silence over subpoena, two women whose ordeal survives today only in a transcript and a broken parcel thrown at a fan — did not require BASL's outrage to be exposed. It required a human rights lawyer, a documentary, and a husband with nothing left to lose.
Perfume is cheap.
Mechanism is expensive.
BASL has offered the first and withheld the second.
Fairness requires noting that even the President did not claim this reform is flawless. Pressed on why judges nearing retirement now happen to benefit, he did not deny the coincidence — he reframed it. Delaying an appointment to protect the Easter Sunday trial, he said, may itself disadvantage another judge waiting in line; ensuring fairness to one person can create unfairness to another. It was, in his own words, "a relative matter." That is, in effect, AKD conceding a version of BASL's own argument — that the bill is not a perfectly clean instrument, not 100 percent fair to every judge in every seat. He answered that imperfection is not disqualifying: the question is not whether a policy produces zero friction anywhere, but whether it produces more justice than forcing out experienced judges mid-trial.
That is a fair concession, and a provocation should not pretend it away. There remains a version of BASL’s concern that survives everything above: institutional independence should hold regardless of who currently sits in the chair, precisely because the next bench may not carry this one’s record. Judged that way, “this power could be misused later” is not empty mood — it is the kind of foresight constitutional design exists to encode. Reasonable lawyers can hold that view in good faith.
The Lenin Rathnayake case is a genuine indictment of institutional cover-up — but it is equally an argument for stronger structural checks on judicial power, not fewer.
There is a harder question BASL has not answered, unrelated to retirement ages. When the Bar Association convened its general meeting this year, it did not invite the sitting Chief Justice, Preethi Padman Surasena — the same judge who, as President of the Court of Appeal, ruled the 52-day Rajapaksa government of 2018 unconstitutional, and whose Presidential Commission recommended stripping Mahinda Rajapaksa of civil rights. It invited another Supreme Court judge instead — read, by serious observers, as a calculated diminishing of the very judiciary BASL claims to defend.
And when members of the legal fraternity began making public remarks targeting the Chief Justice personally — serious enough that senior Attorney-at-Law Jagath Abeynayake formally called on BASL to investigate its own members and issue a statement defending judicial independence — the Bar did not respond. No investigation. No statement. The same institution that speaks the anxious vocabulary of "independence of the judiciary" over a retirement-age bill has found no words when its own Chief Justice is insulted by name. That principle should not switch off the moment defending it means defending a man BASL has already snubbed.
Strip the incense from both sides and a citizen is left holding two kinds of claims. One offers a demonstrated record: judges who ruled against four presidents at cost to themselves, and a reform that, on its own text, creates no new lever for the executive to pull. The other offers a warning about the future, unanchored to any specific lever in this amendment — a warning the President himself has partly conceded, while still asking the country to weigh it against a trial system that cannot wait.
Between a shown fact and an unshown fear, trust the fact — but do not let either side stop talking to the other.
We can trust our judges.
Not because the journey has been fragrant — it plainly has not — but because trust was never a matter of scent. It was always a matter of what a judge does when the room goes quiet, and the powerful are watching. This bench has already answered that question four times over. The reform does nothing to change that answer. It only asks that the country not discard judges who passed the test over a smell nobody has managed to trace back to a source.
Over a million cases sit unresolved in this country's courts.
That backlog is the real stink :
the years a woman waits for a hearing,
the years a man waits behind bars for a trial that hasn't come,
the years it took for Jayantha Gunawardhana Manike's ordeal,
and the ordeal of the second woman whose name history did not even bother to record,
to reach a transcript at all.
A reform that keeps experienced judges on the bench two years longer, without handing the executive a single new instrument of control, is aimed at that number, not at atmosphere.
We trust our judges.
Whether we can trust the Bar that spent its outrage on a fragrance, and its silence on a stool pit — and whether the Bar, the government, and the Chief Justice's own commission can put down their instruments long enough to actually deliver justice to those two women, and to the million more waiting behind them — is the question this essay leaves standing.
This is our motherland.
It does not belong to a fragrance, or to a stench. It belongs to whichever side of this argument finally stops posturing and starts building courtrooms that work.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-08-18 19:52:28)
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