By Sarath de Alwis –

Sri Lanka’s post-Independence history is a masterclass narrative of institutional decay. This inexorable process of rotting gathered a speedier momentum under the all-powerful executive presidency of the JRJ constitution of 1978. It systematically hollowed out the separation of powers, leaving the state’s checks and balances fragile, reactive, and deeply fractured.

The tragedy of contemporary Sri Lankan elitist institutionalism is no longer just the aggressive overreach of the executive; it is the paralyzing formalism of the institutions meant to define and defend democracy.

This lamentable descent into deep toxic social and moral decay is perfectly embodied in the Bar Association of Sri Lanka’s (BASL) opposition to the recent 22nd Amendment bill.

On the surface, BASL’s resistance—particularly regarding reforms to superior court judicial retirement ages—is wrapped in the noble, universally accepted doctrine of “judicial independence.”

But beneath this virtuous vocabulary lies a false doctrinaire trap: an insular legal purism that values abstract form over functional reality.

By aggressively demanding a referendum or pushing for a parliamentary “conscience vote” even after the Supreme Court cleared the bill’s constitutionality, a sizable section of the legal fraternity falls into a dangerous paradox.

In the zeal to protect the judiciary from potential executive interference, defensive legalism ends up shielding the administration of justice from routine, necessary legislative accountability.

True institutional health cannot survive on a purely defensive diet of presumed legal formalism.

When professional bodies reflexively treat every structural modernization as an existential threat to the rule of law, they inadvertently perpetuate the status quo.

If Sri Lanka is to break its cycle of institutional paralysis, its legal scholars and practitioners must look beyond the letter of abstract doctrines and embrace the structural, transparent evolution that a modern state demands.

Otherwise, the defense of the law will continue to be the very thing that stands in the way of justice.

Which brings us to the subject of Professor GL Peiris. He loomed large on the first day of the debate in parliament over the 22^nd Amendment.

Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara found Legal Scholar Profssor GL Peiris’s opposition to the 22^nd Amendment laughable and loathsome. He accused Professor Peiris of preventing Justice Mark Fernando from becoming the Chief Justice.

How Justice Mark Fernando was denied the office of Chief Justice is an indelible blot in the history of our legal system.

The Story of Professor GL Peiris Eminent Legal Scholar and Preeminent Political Trapeze artist needs to be told. His transformation from Scholar to Sycophant of the Sovereign explains the ease with which the privileged turned in to parasites .      

As a Rhodes Scholar and Oxford Fellow, his early contributions as the Dean of the Faculty of Law and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Colombo mapped out brilliant intellectual contours.

His textbook tomes on the law of evidence, criminal procedure, and administrative jurisprudence remain standard fixtures in the education of every Sri Lankan attorney.

Yet, the history of his political career reveals an entirely different legacy: a chilling capacity for structural sycophancy, where his intellectual prowess was systematically weaponized to dismantle the very rule of law he once taught!

Nowhere was this erosion more devastating than in the political maneuverings surrounding the upper echelons of the superior courts during the Presidency of Chandrika Kumaratunga.

The most egregious casualty of the CBK era was Justice Mark Fernando, a jurist of impeccable integrity and towering intellect, whose landmark judgments expanded fundamental rights and stood as a firewall against executive overreach.

By all norms of seniority and merit, Justice Fernando should have ascended to become the Chief Justice of Sri Lanka.

Instead, he was deliberately bypassed, marginalized, and systematically deprived of his rightful leadership role.

The weaponization of the law that facilitated this injustice occurred during the tenure of the Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga administration, where Prof. GL Peiris served as her influential Minister of Justice, Constitutional Affairs, and National Integration.

Rather than acting as the custodian of judicial independence, Peiris acquiesced to—and intellectually insulated—CBK’s executive apparatus that viewed independent judges with visceral hostility.

Instead of appointing the fiercely independent Justice Fernando, the executive appointed Sarath N. Silva, a choice that inaugurated a deeply politicized chapter in the nation’s legal history.

The opposition to Justice Fernando was rarely overt; it was executed through an institutionalized, oblique strategy of exclusion.

International Observers such as the The Asian Human Rights Commission has detailed how Justice Mark Fernando was systematically sidelined within his own court.

He was deliberately excluded from critical benches tasked with evaluating the constitutionality of major bills before Parliament.

The intellectual architecture of the Ministry of Justice, presided over by the very learned Professor Peiris, sat in compliant silence as the executive selectively cultivated a judicial bench that favored executive expedience over constitutional purism.

Feeling the walls of institutional decay closing in, Justice Fernando took premature retirement in 2005, a full two and a half years before his term expired.

His resignation was not a retreat; it was an act of profound protest against a compromised system.

A massive signature campaign crossing political, legal, and multi-religious spectrums begged him to stay, but the damage had been done.

The tragic paradox of GL Peiris lies in this exact juxtaposition. The academic who cataloged the principles of natural justice and administrative fairness became the politician who engineered—or quietly legitimized—the mechanics of their subversion.

Decades later, even as Peiris files petitions and issues press statements lamenting executive interference in the judiciary, his words ring hollow against the backdrop of history. The marginalization of Justice Mark Fernando remains a permanent stain on Sri Lanka’s democratic fabric, reminding us that when brilliant legal minds sell their talents to authoritarian politics, it is the soul of the republic that pays the ultimate price.