By Vox Civis
In a few days, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his National People’s Power (NPP) will mark two years in office. It is an anniversary that invites a simple question, one that voters everywhere eventually ask of the governments they elect with high hopes: what, precisely, has been delivered?
The honest answer, on the evidence of these two years, is that delivery has been selective — swift and determined when a measure serves the regime, sluggish and indifferent when it serves the people who elected it.
Nothing illustrates this distortion more starkly than the contrast between the government’s handling of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution and its handling of Cyclone Ditwah’s aftermath. Ditwah struck in late November last year, killing hundreds of people, displacing hundreds of thousands, and inflicting an estimated four billion dollars in damage — nearly a tenth of it to roads, bridges, railways and water systems alone. Nearly a year later, the main upcountry rail line remains non-functional, reconstruction drags on, and communities still wait for the basic infrastructure that connects them to schools, hospitals and markets.
Contrast that with the 22nd Amendment, gazetted on 7 August and rushed through its First Reading within days, debated and pushed toward passage with a haste the government has found for no other piece of legislation in two years. When the state can move at speed, it is worth asking what it chooses to move quickly for, and the answer, this year, has not been cyclone victims.
Declining popularity
That contrast captures something larger about these two years. Independent assessments of the government’s record does recognise achievements; progress on social protection, and improvements in institutional transparency that were largely absent under previous administrations. But the same assessments fault the government for delay on the constitutional overhaul it promised and reconciliation efforts that remain stalled. Two years after a genuinely historic election result — a supermajority no single party had won since 1977 — the NPP’s popularity is visibly on the decline, and the 22nd Amendment is a significant reason why.
The NPP continues to maintain that the Bill simply raises the retirement age of Supreme Court judges from 65 to 67 and of Court of Appeal judges from 63 to 65, while also expanding the Court of Appeal’s bench. For the Chief Justice specifically, it introduces a rule that retirement falls at the earlier of turning 67 or completing six years in the post. The government frames this as an efficiency measure, intended to retain experienced judges and reduce case backlogs.
However, petitioners before the Supreme Court have argued something less flattering: that the incumbent Chief Justice stands to be the first judge who could actually benefit from the change, and they sought his recusal from the very bench hearing the constitutional challenge to it. That application was denied, and the case was heard by a five-judge bench rather than the full court of 17 that the petitioners had asked for.
Whatever the government’s stated intent, the optics — a sitting government altering the tenure rules of the judiciary that must rule on its own amendment, heard by a bench that includes the judge whose own tenure is in question — are difficult to defend, and the public has noticed. Combined with pre-existing murmurs about inefficiency and corruption, the episode has cast a real pall over the government’s second year.
Ghost from the past
There is a bitter irony buried in all this, one that surfaced almost by accident on a television political programme last week. A prominent government Minister, Sunil Handunnetti was confronted with archival footage of himself, recorded while the party was still in opposition, urging voters to record every promise NPP candidates made and to play the recordings once the party was in office. The TV station did just that and Handunnetti went further in the recorded clip: he pledged that an NPP government would legislate to make politicians legally liable for their promises, giving voters the right to recall representatives who failed to deliver within a specified period. And the cherry on top, he said the legislation would be a ‘top priority.’
Watching that clip played back to him, the Minister visibly did not know where to look — a rare moment of speechlessness from an NPP figure. It was a small, almost incidental moment of television, but it crystallised the whole problem: the legislation the party faithfully promised and used liberally to win its massive mandate, is nowhere to be seen, while legislation it never promised, and which decidedly serves the government’s own interest, is being rushed through parliament at speed.
The promise Handunnetti made is not a fantasy. It is already being tested elsewhere, and the results are instructive. Wales has already passed the world’s first law making it a criminal offence for politicians or candidates to make deliberately false or misleading statements during election campaigns; where if an independent judicial process finds intentional deception, the offending politician can be barred from holding office. The law will not take effect before the 2030 election at the earliest, and it applies narrowly to campaign-period statements rather than to governing once in office — a narrower measure than voters might imagine, but a serious one nonetheless.
South Korea and Taiwan have opened parliamentary discussions on recall mechanisms tied directly to broken campaign promises. Vanuatu has re-tabled political integrity and party registration legislation aimed at stopping parties from fabricating grand, untraceable platforms simply to win power. Reform advocates in Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Ireland are pushing proposals modelled on the Welsh framework.
None of this is uncontroversial: critics warn of a chilling effect on politicians who might otherwise speak candidly about difficult, evolving problems, and lawmakers everywhere are struggling with the same drafting puzzle — how to distinguish a calculated lie from a promise that cannot be fulfilled under an honest budget crisis or a coalition compromise. But the direction of travel, in country after country, is unmistakable: toward some form of legal accountability for what politicians tell voters to get elected. It is this identical legislation that the NPP promised to introduce as a top priority. Instead, it is legislating in the opposite direction, entrenching its own convenience rather than the public’s recourse.
Cat out of the bag?
The government’s handling of external scrutiny over the 22nd Amendment has been equally convoluted. Addressing a rally last week — his first since winning the presidency two years ago — the President indicated that as soon as the Supreme Court’s determination on the amendment is delivered, it will be taken straight to Parliament and enacted, with no mention of the referendum that petitioners have explicitly sought. Coming from the Executive before the Court has even ruled, the remark understandably raised serious questions about how much the government believes it already knows about an outcome that is, formally, still undecided.
Rather than engage with that discomfort, or with the substantive concerns international observers have consistently raised, the government has reached for its default response: discredit the messenger.
Commonwealth Lawyers Association (CLA) President Steven Thiru travelled to Sri Lanka at the invitation of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL), observed the Supreme Court hearings on 2 September, and subsequently published a report raising concerns about procedural fairness; the denial of an oral right of reply, the composition of the bench, and the rejection of the recusal application among them. In response, Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara told Parliament that the CLA held no official Commonwealth Secretariat recognition and was, in his words, “a private fee-paying club.”
Deputy Minister Sunil Watagala joined the pile-on. It was an answer that spoke more about the government’s instincts than about the CLA’s credentials. The CLA is not a government body and has no authority over Sri Lanka’s sovereign affairs — that much is true, and nobody has argued otherwise. But it is a recognised, Commonwealth-accredited professional association with a clear, decades-old mandate to promote the rule of law and judicial independence across the Commonwealth, drawing its legitimacy from the same Latimer House Principles that Sri Lanka has itself endorsed.
Dismissing it as an irrelevant subscription club, while the government continues to happily engage the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) on other matters, is not principled scepticism of external bodies but more like irritation at being told something it did not want to hear. Disagreement with the CLA’s findings would have been entirely legitimate, met with facts and argument. Questioning the institution’s right to have an opinion at all was not, and it did the government’s credibility no favours.
Credible entity
It is also worth being precise about what the CLA actually is, since the government’s dismissal depended on the public not knowing. It is a professional body drawing together lawyers, law societies and bar associations from across the Commonwealth, governed by its own executive committee, with a mandate that runs to protecting the independence of the legal profession, safeguarding human rights, improving legal education, and promoting access to justice and good governance among member states. Its value to a country like Sri Lanka is not abstract: as a Commonwealth nation whose legal system is itself built on the common law tradition, Sri Lanka’s own lawyers rely on exactly this kind of international network to exchange expertise and maintain professional standards.
None of that authority extends to governing Sri Lanka, and nobody suggested it did. Thiru did not arrive to instruct the judiciary; he arrived at the Bar Association’s invitation, sat in the ceremonial court as an observer, and wrote a report. If the government genuinely believes in transparency and judicial independence it says it values, that kind of external scrutiny is something to welcome rather than deflect. Sovereignty is a legitimate principle of statecraft; it is not a shield against inconvenient observation.
The legal battle over the amendment itself, meanwhile, is far from settled. A fresh fundamental rights petition, filed by Dulara Gunathilake, Convenor of the Union of National Organisations, together with retired Air Force officer Shantha Jayathilake, alleges that an earlier petition challenging the 22nd Amendment was never called in open court — and that the omission violated the petitioners’ constitutional rights to equality and a fair hearing.
This is not a peripheral technicality. Article 121(1) gives citizens just 14 days from a bill’s gazetting to petition the Supreme Court; if that window can be lost to an administrative oversight rather than a citizen’s own delay, the constitutional remedy itself becomes illusory. The petitioners have also asked the Court to block its determination from reaching the Speaker until their complaint is resolved — a request that, if granted, would collide directly with the 21-day constitutional deadline under Article 121(3) for that determination to be communicated, and would force the judiciary to invoke its inherent powers to protect a right that ordinary procedure could be perceived as having failed to protect.
The bottom-line
But underneath the procedural dispute lies a more profound constitutional principle: tenure security as the backbone of judicial independence. Article 107 makes the impeachment of Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges deliberately, almost punishingly difficult, so that no government of the day can bend the judiciary to its convenience.
Changing the retirement terms of sitting judges through an ordinary constitutional amendment may look, on its face, like a technical reform. But its implications are clearly far greater. It sets a precedent that any future government — of any political colour — could exploit to reshape the judiciary in its own image, simply by adjusting when judges must leave the bench rather than by the far more visible and difficult route of impeachment. And that, in the simplest form, is how this seemingly innocuous amendment would impact not only the judiciary, but more directly, the sovereign – the people.
None of this means the amendment’s fate is sealed either way. Parliamentary rules offer real avenues for delay and challenge. Standing Orders 55 and 56 confine Committee Stage amendments to the Bill’s original scope and purpose; anything introduced beyond that scope can, in principle, be ruled out by the Speaker, or challenged as a substantive new element requiring separate gazetting and fresh Supreme Court scrutiny.
Requesting a formal division on every clause during the Committee Stage is a legitimate, if unglamorous, tool for buying time. And beneath all the procedure lies simple arithmetic: a constitutional amendment needs 150 votes, a two-thirds majority, and if enough MPs can be persuaded to abstain, the government may be forced to withdraw or shelve the Bill rather than risk a defeat on the floor. None of this is exotic obstruction; it is Parliament working as designed, and civil society and the opposition would be well within their rights to use every inch of it.
Sri Lanka’s internal constitutional wrangling, moreover, does not happen in a vacuum the rest of the world ignores. The IMF’s own governance diagnostic carried out post-bankruptcy treats judicial independence as inseparable from the country’s economic credibility. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers has already cautioned the government that ad hoc changes to judicial tenure, made without proper consultation, risks eroding public confidence in the administration of justice. The EU’s GSP+ trade concessions and the Commonwealth’s own Latimer House Principles both rest on the same premise. A government chasing investment and export access has more than a domestic reason to get this right; it has a set of international obligations it would be unwise to test.
Stretching it to the limit
Depending on how the Supreme Court and Parliament handle the coming weeks, the amendment could become law within two to three weeks in the most expedited scenario or take four to six weeks if procedural objections and committee-stage divisions accumulate as expected. If the Court grants an interim order, or if the government cannot secure its 150 votes and is forced to refer the Bill to a Select Committee, the process could stretch to two or three months — or collapse altogether. In other words, for all the government’s rhetorical urgency, the outcome remains genuinely open, and the space for opposition and civil society to compel a rethink is real. It is also a test for the political opposition to at least now utilise this tiny window to get its act together.
Meanwhile, as the second anniversary celebrations approach, the President is already back on the political platform, adding fresh promises to an ever-lengthening pile. It underlines, more than anything else in these two years, why the accountability legislation the NPP itself promised is so badly needed — not as an abstract ideal borrowed from Wales or Taiwan, but as a plain domestic necessity.
Sri Lankan voters are not naive; they are simply, by design, given no mechanism to hold anyone accountable to what was promised at the podium. The politicians who have won most consistently in recent decades have too often been the ones most willing to say what people wanted to hear and least burdened by any intention of doing it. If that pattern is ever to break, the politicians will have to be forced into honesty by law, because they plainly will not arrive there on their own.
There is, in fact, a simpler and more devastating campaign strategy sitting in plain sight for whichever party challenges the NPP next. It would not need new slogans or fresh promises of its own. It would only need to gather footage that already exists — Handunnetti’s promise chief among it — and project it, unedited, on a screen at every rally, in every village and town junction across the island. Let the NPP’s own words, from its own opposition years, do the campaigning. Sometimes the most powerful argument a politician’s opponents can make is simply to press ‘play.’
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication.
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