By Vox Civis
The National People’s Power (NPP) campaigned and was elected to office on a single, repeated word: transparency. It was not a peripheral pledge tucked into a manifesto nobody reads; it was the argument for the party’s very existence. The NPP, which built its legitimacy on the claim that Sri Lanka’s old political class hid its dealings, protected its own and treated public office as private property, cannot now ask the public to simply trust it when it does the same, or seemingly, worse.
Power that comes from the people carries with it an obligation to answer to the people. That obligation does not pause because the government finds it inconvenient, and it does not shrink because the government insists its motives are pure. It is tested in moments like this, when the government moves fast in introducing controversial legislation, explains little, and expects the public to look away. In this day and age, that is simply not on – not by any measure, by and party, and more so, the NPP.
On August 7, ignoring a chorus of protest, the government gazetted the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, raising the retirement age of Supreme Court judges from 65 to 67 and of Court of Appeal judges from 63 to 65, while capping any Chief Justice’s tenure at six years or the age of 67, whichever comes first. A companion Judicature (Amendment) Bill extends the same logic through the wider court structure, and the package also raises the ceiling on Court of Appeal judges from 19 to 24, supposedly to relieve a bench straining under more than 1.1 million pending cases.
Official justification
The government’s justification, offered by Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara, is that Sri Lanka has roughly 20 judges per million people against 40 to 60 in developed countries, and that losing experienced judges to retirement while cases sit unheard for years serves no one. That is a real problem, and it deserves a real answer. But the answer the government has chosen has managed, in a matter of weeks, to unite the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL), the Free Lawyers Association, the Buddhist and Christian clergy, sitting judges, civil society and virtually the entire political opposition against it. That is definitely not the mark of a reform, whose logic speaks for itself.
Within hours of the gazette, senior President’s Counsel were warning of resistance in the streets. Anura Meddegoda, a former president of the BASL, said the legal fraternity would contest the amendment step by step, “even if it means taking to the streets,” and argued that a patchwork amendment is the wrong way to go about it. He emphasised that the NPP campaigned on the promise of a new Constitution, received a mandate for exactly that, and should now deliver it rather than reach for piecemeal changes that serve an immediate political need.
He is right that the honest route was always available to this government. If judicial capacity is the problem, the eight existing vacancies in the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, unfilled for seven months, could have been filled. If the bench is thin, the number of High Court judges could have been raised, as Meddegoda proposed, from 93 toward 110.
If the retirement age itself needs revisiting, Sri Lanka’s own constitutional history offers the accepted method: retirement ages have moved upward with each new Constitution, not through standalone amendments to the existing one, because a new charter resets every judge’s oath and appointment date and removes any question of the change being tailored to a person rather than a principle. None of that was done here. Instead, the government chose the fastest possible route, and speed, and in this context, is itself an argument the public is entitled to interrogate.
Indefensible sequence of events
That interrogation gets harder to dismiss the longer you look at the sequence of events. As late as July 3, the Secretary to the Ministry of Justice, said publicly that her Ministry had not been made aware of any plan to change the retirement age of judges and that nothing had been referred to her. The Cabinet nonetheless approved the proposal that same month, and it was announced to the public on July 28.
Under normal process, a Cabinet paper on a matter within the Justice Ministry’s remit is expected to be routed through its own Secretary before it reaches Cabinet. When the Secretary is on record saying she knew nothing of the plan days before it was approved, the question is not a technicality. It is a question about who actually authored a constitutional amendment reshaping the judiciary, and why the officer who should have carried it there, did not. The government has not offered a public account of that gap, and it should. A reform this consequential cannot be allowed to arrive at Cabinet by a route its own Ministry cannot explain.
Layered onto this is the timing that critics on all sides of the legal profession have already flagged, and that even sympathetic commentators concede is awkward. The incumbent Chief Justice, appointed in July 2025, is due to retire on December 1 this year on turning 65. Absent this amendment, that date is fixed. With it, he could remain in office for two further years.
An unsettling coincidence
The government insists the reform is systemic, applies to every judge regardless of rank, and targets no individual: Cabinet Spokesman Nalinda Jayatissa has said so explicitly, and it is only fair to record that denial alongside the criticism. But the coincidence of dates is not something the government’s denial could erase, and it is why opponents inside and outside Parliament have taken to calling this, bluntly, the “Surasena Amendment.”
The Free Lawyers Association has noted that the Chief Justice’s own record on clearing case backlogs is genuinely strong, which makes it harder, not easier, to accept that his tenure is incidental to a bill framed around backlog relief. And it matters because the judge in line to succeed him under normal seniority would be displaced by the arrangement now being rushed through. A citizen does not need to accuse anyone of bad faith to conclude that a government owes the public a clearer explanation than “trust the process,” when the process itself cannot account for its own paperwork.
The legal argument against the Amendment is not merely political theatre either. In 2022, ruling on the Inland Revenue (Amendment) Bill, the Supreme Court held that any constitutional change to the retirement age or tenure of sitting judges, whether it affects them directly or indirectly, touches the independence of the judiciary and therefore falls under Article 3 of the Constitution, which cannot be altered without a referendum.
Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa has already cited that determination in Parliament, and President’s Counsel Thisath Wijegunawardene has made the same point publicly. The government’s position, delivered by Minister Jayatissa, is that no referendum is constitutionally required. That dispute will very likely end up before the Supreme Court itself, and if it does, the Court will be asked to rule on a question that goes directly to the tenure of its own members, an awkward position for any bench, and one more reason the government should have chosen the route of a new Constitution rather than an amendment built to survive a legal challenge by the narrowest possible margin.
Re-enacting the past
There is a broader pattern here that is worth a second look, because Sri Lanka has been here before, from the opposite direction. In 2013, Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake was removed through an impeachment widely understood, at home and internationally, as punishment for rulings the government of the day did not want. That was a case of a judiciary being disciplined into compliance.
What critics now allege is the mirror image: not punishing an inconvenient judiciary, but extending a seemingly convenient one. Whether or not that allegation is ultimately fair to any individual judge, the fact that both accusations, years apart and aimed at opposite outcomes, keep landing on the same structural weakness – a judiciary whose tenure can be bent by whichever government holds a two-thirds majority – should worry anyone who cares about the courts functioning as a check on power, rather than an extension of it.
It is worth recalling, in this light, what President J.R. Jayewardene said of his own 1978 Constitution’s design. Speaking in 1988 in Tambuttegama, coincidentally President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s home village, Jayewardene pointed to the referendum requirement as one of the Constitution’s most important safeguards, because it meant a government’s term, and by extension its power, could not be extended without the public’s direct consent, and he predicted that no single party would again secure the two-thirds majority his own had won in 1977 with just over half the popular vote.
He was wrong about that prediction: both the Rajapaksa government and the current one have since commanded two-thirds majorities. But his underlying point stands. A two-thirds majority was meant to force cross-party consensus on constitutional change, not to hand one party a free hand to rewrite the rules whenever it holds the numbers.
Aristotle, writing more than 2000 years earlier, made a related distinction: he regarded unconstrained popular rule, power exercised without being bound by settled law, as democracy’s most degraded form, and considered government that remained subject to its own constitution the higher standard. A mandate is not a blank cheque. It is a trust, and trusts have terms.
Another blindside move
That same test now applies to the Anti-Corruption (Amendment) Bill as well, gazetted on July 24, which proposed restricting the use of politicians’ asset and liability declarations to submission to a specified official or institution. It effectively criminalised media scrutiny, civil society analysis and public discussion that the Anti-Corruption Act of 2023, one of the genuine post-crisis reforms won after the Aragalaya, was designed to enable.
Transparency International Sri Lanka was among the first to warn that the change would gut the very purpose of making these declarations public in the first place, discouraging the scrutiny that exposes hidden wealth and conflicts of interest in the first place, and would hand the enforcement authority broad discretion to redact information on privacy grounds. What followed was a massive public backlash against the proposed amendment.
To the government’s credit, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than pretending otherwise, the backlash worked. On August 6, facing pressure from both local and international watchdogs and mounting criticism in Parliament, House Leader Bimal Rathnayake announced that the Bill would be revised so that asset declarations of elected public representatives remain publicly accessible, with President Dissanayake himself reportedly directing officials to preserve that access.
That reversal deserves credit, because it shows public pressure still moves this government when applied early and loudly enough. But it also deserves scrutiny rather than relief: the revised bill still distinguishes politicians from a much larger universe of ‘designated’ officials, professionals and media figures brought under the Act, whose declarations may now face tighter restriction, and the central authority’s discretion to redact on vaguely defined privacy grounds has not, as far as the public record shows, been narrowed.
Growing trust deficit
A government that had to be pushed into protecting transparency for its own MPs after quietly proposing to weaken it should not be trusted to have gotten every other corner of the same bill right on the first attempt. The public, having forced one retreat, has every reason to keep reading the rest of the bill closely.
But, the more unfortunate outcome of this episode thus far has been that none of this has produced an opposition juggernaut capable of matching the moment. Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa convened a round-table of opposition parties on July 23 to agree a common response, and the main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) has since formally asked the Speaker to establish a Parliamentary Select Committee on judicial delays and the process behind this amendment, a request several MPs, including the SJB’s Rohini Kaviratne, have pressed on the floor of Parliament. Those are legitimate, useful steps.
But a Select Committee request and scattered petition drives are not the same as a unified public campaign, and the opposition parties who met on July 23 have yet to agree on one. Even within the governing alliance itself, dissent is not imaginary: Lal Wijenayake, a lawyer and member of the NPP’s own Executive Council, has said openly that he understands the government wants “certain judges out and certain judges in” – a striking admission from inside the party proposing the amendment. If a government’s own senior figures are uneasy enough to say so in public, the collective opposition’s failure to convert that unease into sustained pressure and mobilise the public, is its own kind of political failure.
The final reckoning
The choice before the NPP government is not complicated, even if the politics around it have become messy. It can pass this amendment on the strength of a parliamentary majority and dare the Supreme Court, the Bar and the public to stop it, betting that a referendum can be avoided and that public attention will move on.
Or it can do what its own manifesto promised and what its own most credible critics, not its enemies but former Bar Association presidents and its own party’s lawyers, are asking for: put the retirement age question, the executive presidency, the electoral system and the shape of the judiciary into a genuine constitutional process – one built on consensus rather than on the calendar of a single Chief Justice’s retirement date.
A government that was elected to end the practice of bending the state to serve whoever happens to hold it, does not get to make an exception for itself, quietly, through a gazette on a Friday afternoon. Transparency was never meant to be a slogan for the previous political class alone. It was the standard the NPP asked to be judged by. It should not now be surprised to be held to it.
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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