What 22A debate left behind

Wednesday, 30 September 2026 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Laws are passed and forgotten. Perceptions stay. Long after the details of the 22nd Amendment fade, Sri Lankans will remember what the debate around it seemed to reveal. It is worth asking what that is.

The first perception is the one the critics warned about: a Government reaching into the courts. The concern was not baseless. The amendment raises the retirement age of sitting judges, not only future ones, and its timing coincided with the approaching retirement of a Supreme Court judge. The UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers raised the same worry, though she was careful to say that appearance is not proof, and that a judge who benefits from a law is not, for that reason alone, biased.

Yet the facts deserve equal weight. The age was raised for every judge of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal alike, by the same two years. A favour meant for one person rarely comes in one size for all. If this was a scheme to keep a friendly bench, it was a strangely clumsy one. The Government, for its part, kept the doubt alive by refusing simple safeguards, such as transitional rules, that would have put the matter to rest. Stubbornness is not the same as intent, but it looks like it.

So the first perception remains possible, but thin.

The second perception was not what anyone set out to create. It came from watching who grew angry, and how.

Principled objection has a certain tone. It argues about rules, cites precedents and proposes alternatives. It is patient, because principle can afford to be. Parliament heard some of that. It also heard something else: personal attacks on the Supreme Court and on the Chief Justice, delivered with a heat that the question of a two-year extension hardly seems to justify.

Readers may wish to consider the calendar. These attacks have come at a time when the courts are hearing cases that, only a few years ago, few believed would ever be heard. Individuals once thought to be beyond the reach of the law now spend their days in remand. It would be unfair to say every critic of the amendment has a personal stake in the courts. Many do not. But it would be naive to believe that none do.

There is an old pattern in this country. Reform is rarely opposed in the name of what it costs the powerful. It is opposed in the name of principle, which sounds better. The loudest defenders of judicial independence are not always its truest friends. Sometimes they are simply the people who would prefer the judges to be weaker.

Here lies the irony. Those who warned that the amendment would damage public confidence in the courts may have done more damage in a few parliamentary sittings than the amendment itself could ever do. A perception of Government influence was a risk. Open contempt for the highest court, voiced from the floor of the House, is a fact.

None of this makes the Government’s handling wise. It could have consulted more, explained more and bent a little. A confident Government does not fear safeguards.

But citizens should judge by conduct, not by slogans. The debate asked whether the Government wanted the courts on its side. The answer is uncertain. The debate may have answered a different question more clearly: who has most reason to fear the courts as they now stand.

That is a perception too. It may prove the more lasting one.