There is a saying – a modern take on an old Roman complaint – that the closer an empire drifts towards collapse, the more deranged its laws become. The line is often mistaken for a direct quotation from Tacitus, but its root is real: in the ‘Annals,’ the historian observed that the more corrupt the republic, the more numerous its laws. He was not being poetic; he was describing a mechanism.
Functioning states govern through a handful of durable principles. Failing ones bury the principles under an avalanche of statutes, each one written not to solve a crisis, but to manage the appearance of one, or to silence whoever keeps pointing it out. The pattern repeats with unsettling consistency: panicking governments try to legislate away problems that are structural rather than technical, producing rules so specific and so punitive that they hardly seem like policy.
Rather than confronting the corruption or dysfunction at the root of a crisis, they turn the machinery of law towards controlling its symptoms: silencing critics and regulating private conduct. And as the laws detach from reason and justice, governance stops resting on consent and starts resting on coercion. So much so that the public can feel the shift even before it can name it.
It is difficult to find any better explanation for the sudden burst of legislative activity coming out of the National People’s Power (NPP) Government. Within the space of a few weeks, the NPP has pushed forward two initiatives that sit awkwardly beside its founding promise to clean up governance, and both converge on the same target: the institutions built – however imperfectly – to hold power accountable.
The quieter of the two, though arguably the more insidious, is the amendment to the Anti-Corruption Act No.9 of 2023, gazetted in late July. Stripped of its technical language, the bill would choke off the public’s ability to use, discuss, or question the asset and liability declarations that public officials are required to file.
The single most important feature of the 2023 act was that these declarations were no longer sealed inside a filing cabinet; they had to be published, so that citizens could see for themselves what their representatives owned and how it compared with what those representatives earned. The amendment does not delete that requirement outright, it does something more surgical: it confines the lawful use of a declaration to submission to the designated authority, which in practice means that a journalist, an activist, or an ordinary citizen who raises questions about a politician’s unexplained wealth in public could be treated as having misused information that was, until now, explicitly theirs to use.
This transparency mechanism was not a Sri Lankan invention born of political virtue. It was introduced during Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidency, largely on the advice of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as part of the price of the country’s economic rescue. Before it existed, candidates were technically required to declare their assets, but nobody outside a small circle of officials ever knew whether they had, or what those declarations contained.
The public disclosure requirement changed that in a single stroke. It is also worth remembering how narrow the avenues for accountability already are. Under Sri Lankan law, only the Attorney General and the Bribery Commission may prosecute corruption; the public’s role is limited to filing a complaint and hoping it is acted upon. When those complaints go nowhere, as they often have, public disclosure and public scrutiny are the only mechanisms left. Removing them, therefore, does not merely inconvenience watchdogs; it closes the last open door.
To its credit, the Government did not hold its ground once the backlash arrived. Leader of the House Bimal Rathnayake told Parliament last week that the bill would be revised so that the declarations of public representatives remained open to the public, even as the Government pursued tighter privacy protections for the far larger pool of officials, now numbering in the thousands, who were also required to file.
However, the retreat does not fully erase the unease the episode created. The original gazette stated plainly that it had been issued on the President’s instructions. When the political cost became clear, the explanation offered was that the President had ordered it withdrawn, as though he had been a bystander to his own Government’s gazette notice rather than its author. Perhaps that is exactly what happened inside a large and uneven administration, but a citizenry that has just watched its access to politicians’ wealth nearly vanish through the back door is entitled to some scepticism about who knew what, and when.
That controversy unfolded in the shadow of the larger one, the proposed constitutional amendment, approved by Cabinet also in late July, to raise the retirement age of judges across the entire court system by two years, taking Supreme Court judges from 65 to 67 and Court of Appeal judges from 63 to 65, with corresponding increases below. The Government framed this as a practical fix for a Judiciary buckling under more than a million pending cases. It may even believe that.
Belief, however, is not the same as public confidence, and on this measure, public confidence has evaporated almost entirely. More than 3,000 lawyers voted against the proposal at a special general meeting of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL). The Judicial Service Association publicly opposed it, and the Commonwealth Lawyers Association objected.
So did the respected International Association of Judges, the world’s largest body of its kind, which stated plainly that its concern was not the idea of adjusting a retirement age, but the arbitrary manner of its introduction and the widespread perception, which it said would corrode public trust regardless of the Government’s actual intentions. It noted that the change seemed tailored to benefit particular judicial officers. The collective political Opposition, the Maha Sangha, and the Church of Ceylon have all added their voices. Rarely has a single measure produced such unanimity of concern from constituencies that agree on so little else.
The Government’s answer has not been persuasion. It has been arithmetic: a bare assertion from the Cabinet Spokesman that the amendment will pass because the numbers for a two-thirds majority exist, and that this is the end of the conversation.
This brushes past an inconvenient detail. The Supreme Court itself determined in 2022 that a change of this nature requires not just a parliamentary supermajority but the direct consent of the people at a referendum. A government that hears objections from the bench, the bar, the clergy, and international observers alike, and answers only with a vote count, has already told the country how it regards the requirement of consent, and by extension, democracy.
Former Justice Minister Ali Sabry has argued that the BASL’s role in this fight is not that of a trade union defending its members’ interests, but something closer to a constitutional guardian. The rule of law cannot exist without a genuine separation of powers, and separation of powers cannot exist without judicial independence; a court that fears for its composition or its tenure is a court that has already been compromised, whatever its judgments continue to say. Because the Judiciary can only speak through its rulings and cannot enter public debate to defend itself, that task inevitably falls to the profession that stands before it.
Sabry traces this obligation through Sri Lanka’s own history: to Chief Justice Sir Sidney Abrahams, who ruled against the colonial Governor in the Bracegirdle case; to Chief Justice Neville Samarakoon, who placed principle above his own position; and to Justice R.S. Wanasundera, who delivered a dissenting judgment on the 13th Amendment, knowing it would likely cost him the chief justice’s chair.
None of these were comfortable stands. All of them were necessary ones. The Bar’s own record echoes the same instinct, from its defence of Samarakoon and later of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake, to its response when lawyers were attacked, to its opposition to summoning judges before parliamentary committees. It is a further irony that some of the very people now defending these two bills are those that stood alongside the Bar in these same struggles, when the political shoe was on the other foot.
None of this means the alarm has already been justified by catastrophe. It has not. The line, as one commentator put it, still holds. But Tacitus’s warning was never really about the number of laws a failing state produces; it was about what that number reveals of a government’s relationship to its own accountability. A state confident in its legitimacy does not need to restrict what citizens may say about a politician’s bank balance, nor does it need to override a unanimous chorus of judges, lawyers, clergy, and international observers with a bare count of parliamentary votes.
Sri Lanka’s institutions, imperfect as they are, have so far absorbed both shocks and forced partial retreats. Whether the Government treats that as a lesson in restraint, or merely as a tactical delay before trying again, will say a great deal about which road the country is actually on.