By Lionel Bopage –

On 27 July 2026, the Cabinet of Ministers approved a proposal to raise the retirement age of judges at every level of Sri Lanka’s judiciary by two years — Supreme Court judges from 65 to 67, Court of Appeal judges from 63 to 65, with corresponding extensions for High Court, District Court and Magistrate Court judges. Within days, the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) had unanimously passed a resolution against the move, the Judicial Service Association representing District Judges and Magistrates had voted by secret ballot to oppose it, opposition parties had convened joint strategy meetings, and even the Commonwealth Lawyers Association had weighed in from abroad.

The debate, in other words, has been captured almost entirely by lawyers, judges and constitutional experts. That is precisely the problem.

Every issue must be seen whole, and in its context

No public question can be sensibly resolved by carving it out of its surroundings and examining it under a purely legal microscope. The retirement age of judges is not a free-standing technical question about Article 107(5) of the Constitution. It sits inside a justice system in visible distress, inside a political moment in which a government elected on an anti-corruption mandate is attempting to enforce the rule of law against powerful interests, and inside a society whose trust in its institutions has been battered by decades of impunity.

The distinguished professionals who have entered this debate — presidents of the Bar, retired judges, constitutional scholars — have contributed genuinely valuable perspectives drawn from their professional experience. Their warnings deserve to be heard: security of tenure is indeed a safeguard of judicial independence, and constitutional amendments made in a piecemeal or ad hoc fashion can indeed erode the sanctity of the Constitution, as the Commonwealth Lawyers Association has cautioned. These are serious arguments made by serious people.

But they are arguments made from inside a professional frame. The question that matters most is not what the amendment means for the career expectations of judges or the doctrinal purity of the Constitution. It is what it means for the ordinary citizen — the litigant waiting a decade for a land case, the mother whose son has sat on remand for two years awaiting a Government Analyst’s report, the worker who has watched the powerful walk free while the powerless are punished. In a democracy, the ultimate guardians of the rule of law are not the courts. They are the people. Any political resolution of this issue must therefore rest on the organised strength and informed consent of the masses — not on legislation rammed through Parliament, not on the coercive instruments of the state, and not on the arrogance of authority, whether governmental or professional.

The retirement age is entangled with a system in crisis

To treat the retirement age as an isolated constitutional question is to ignore the wreckage all around it. Consider what the public record now shows.

The backlog. More than 1.13 million cases are stuck in Sri Lanka’s court system, with thousands pending before the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court alone. Investigative reporting has found that the country has roughly one magistrate’s court for every 315,000 people. Justice delayed on this scale is not an administrative inconvenience; it is a daily denial of justice to over a million families.

The prisons. Official Department of Prisons data obtained under the Right to Information Act shows the prison network holding over 41,000 inmates against a designed capacity of around 10,500 — roughly four times capacity. The majority of those behind bars have never been convicted of anything: they are remand prisoners, many detained in the wave of more than 230,000 drug-related arrests since the “Ratama Ekata” operation began. Thousands languish because of delays in Government Analyst reports. The Minister of Justice himself has acknowledged in Parliament that people can wait a year and a half in remand merely to learn whether the substance found on them was a narcotic at all. The Negombo prison tragedy of 2026, and the Mahara riot before it, are the predictable harvest of this neglect.

The institutions of prosecution and adjudication themselves. The Attorney General’s Department has repeatedly faced public criticism over the withdrawal or collapse of high-profile cases. And the judiciary’s own recent history offers cautionary tales that the public has not forgotten. A former Chief Justice, Sarath N. Silva, has himself publicly expressed regret over judgments delivered during his tenure. Mohan Peiris was installed as Chief Justice in 2013 following the deeply controversial impeachment of Shirani Bandaranayake, only to be removed in 2015 when that impeachment was effectively repudiated. The conduct of certain High Court judges has been the subject of disciplinary proceedings. Former Attorney General Sanjaya Rajaratnam’s tenure drew sustained public criticism over prosecutorial decisions in politically sensitive cases. Whatever one’s view of each individual episode, together they demonstrate a truth the public understands instinctively: the formal independence of legal institutions is no guarantee of their integrity. Institutions are only as trustworthy as the conduct of the people within them, and that conduct is ultimately policed not by the profession but by public vigilance.

This is the context in which the retirement age proposal must be judged — not as an abstract question of tenure, but as one lever among many in a system that is failing the people it exists to serve.

The real danger: sabotage of accountability at a decisive moment

Sri Lanka is at a crucial and decisive juncture. For the first time in a generation, a government holds a mandate — and, so far, has largely maintained a practice — of political non-interference in investigations and prosecutions. Long-delayed cases against the powerful are moving. Precisely because of this, it would be naïve to assume that all actors within the legal ecosystem welcome the process. There are individuals and interest groups, inside and outside state institutions, who have every incentive to see political non-interference replaced once again by political interference — who are, in effect, waiting in line for the moment when accountability can be derailed. The recent history recited above shows exactly how such derailment happens: through compromised appointments, manipulated prosecutions, and the quiet strangulation of cases.

Seen in this light, the government’s instinct to secure continuity and experience on the bench at a moment when landmark cases are in motion is not irrational. Preventing lapses that could obstruct or destroy the enforcement of the rule of law is a legitimate — indeed paramount — objective. To that limited extent, measures such as those the government has proposed can be defended as short-term protective steps.

Temporary measures, yes — but only within a long-term, holistic policy

Here, however, is where the government must be honest with itself and with the country. A retirement-age amendment, standing alone, is a fire-fighting measure. Fire-fighting has its place in an emergency, but it is not a justice policy. If the amendment is pushed through by two-thirds majority alone, over the unanimous objection of the Bar, the judges’ own associations and the opposition, the government will have won a legislative battle while losing the deeper war for public trust — and it will have handed its adversaries exactly the narrative they want: that this administration, like every one before it, treats the judiciary as an instrument.

What is required instead is a twin-track approach. In the short term: narrowly framed, transparently justified, explicitly temporary measures to protect the integrity of ongoing accountability processes. In the long term: a comprehensive, holistic reform program addressing the entire chain — the backlog, court and judge numbers, digitisation, the Government Analyst’s capacity, remand and bail policy, prison conditions, the independence and professionalism of the Attorney General’s Department and the police, and durable constitutional arrangements for judicial tenure settled through genuine consensus rather than episodic amendment.

And the method matters as much as the content. The government must abandon the arrogant, top-down, crisis-to-crisis routine that has characterised Sri Lankan governance for decades. It should commit to wide consultation — with the legal profession, certainly, but far beyond it: with trade unions, community organisations, victims’ groups, remand prisoners’ families, and the broad working population whose lives the justice system shapes. It should practise genuine 360-degree communication: explaining its reasoning, publishing its evidence, hearing objections, and adjusting course. System change, not personnel change, is the goal; and system change is only legitimate and durable when it is built on the trust of the people.

The retirement age of judges will be settled, one way or another, in the coming months. Whether the rule of law is strengthened or weakened in the process depends on whether the government — and the legal profession — remember whose justice system this actually is. It belongs neither to the judges nor to the politicians. It belongs to the people of Sri Lanka, and only their organised confidence can secure it.

References: 

Cabinet decision of 27 July 2026 as reported by Lanka News Web and Newswire

BASL Special General Meeting resolution of 29 July 2026 (Sunday Times)

Judicial Service Association letter of 22 July 2026 (Newswire)

Commonwealth Lawyers Association statement, June 2026

Centre for Reporting (cir.lk) on court backlog and prison overcrowding

Department of Prisons data obtained via RTI as reported in July 2026

Parliamentary statements by the Minister of Justice.