Speaking at a media briefing at the Government Information Department, Minister Saroja Savithri Paulraj said a Cabinet paper has been submitted to introduce mandatory clearance certificates for anyone entering, or already serving in, public sector positions that bring them into direct contact with children. Teachers, childcare officers, probation staff and others in similar roles will need to obtain a certificate from the Police or another relevant authority confirming they have not been accused of child related offences, and will be required to renew it at service milestones and salary increments. It is, on its own terms, a sensible and overdue safeguard.

But it would be a mistake to treat this as more than a single brick in a wall that remains largely unbuilt. Sri Lanka does not suffer from a shortage of laws meant to protect children. It suffers from a justice system that cannot deliver on the promises those laws make.

Consider the scale of what is being reported. The National Child Protection Authority received 5,523 complaints in just the first six months of this year alone, among them 1,100 cases of child cruelty, 213 of sexual harassment, 112 of cyber violence against children, 100 of commercial sexual exploitation, 99 of unlawful abduction, 82 of child labour, 60 of aggravated sexual abuse and 40 of teenage pregnancy. This is not an aberration. The NCPA has recorded between ten and eleven thousand complaints a year for some time now, with 10,455 logged in 2025 alone, and a total of 108,581 between 2015 and 2025. These are not abstractions. Each entry represents a child whose safety was violated, and a family left to navigate a system that, by its own numbers, is struggling to cope.

Where the picture becomes genuinely alarming is in the courts. As of the end of April this year, 4,421 child abuse cases were pending before the High Courts, with indictments already filed. Galle, Kurunegala and Kandy carry the heaviest backlogs, each with well over four hundred cases awaiting trial. Thousands more preliminary matters sit before the Magistrate Courts. And the most damning figure of all is one rarely spoken about openly: medico-legal and Right to Information disclosures suggest that the average time between a complaint being filed and a trial concluding runs to somewhere between ten and sixteen years. A child who reports abuse at the age of eight may be approaching thirty before the matter is finally settled in court, if it is settled at all.

This is where the argument for reform must be made plainly. A clearance certificate can stop a known offender from walking into a school or a children's home. It cannot, on its own, stop a system in which the vast majority of offenders are neither known nor convicted, because the machinery of justice moves too slowly to ever reach that point. Deterrence depends not only on the existence of a law but on the credible likelihood that breaking it will be met with a swift and certain consequence. When trials stretch across a decade or more, that credibility collapses, for victims, for their families, and, worst of all, in the calculations of those who might otherwise be dissuaded from offending.

There are signs that this is understood. The establishment of nine provincial video evidence recording units, allowing child victims to give testimony in a less intimidating setting and without repeated court appearances, is a genuinely welcome step, and one that should be expanded rather than treated as a pilot. But it addresses only one part of a much larger bottleneck. What is needed alongside it is a serious, funded commitment to dedicated child abuse courts with the judicial and prosecutorial capacity to clear the existing backlog within a reasonable timeframe, better coordination between the NCPA, the Police and the Attorney General's Department, and a published, transparent account of how many cases are actually being concluded each year rather than simply filed.

The certification scheme should go ahead. It is a reasonable, low cost measure that closes an obvious gap. But it must be understood for what it is: a preventive measure layered on top of a justice system that is, at present, failing to deliver justice within any timeframe that matters to a child. Sri Lanka does not need more paperwork proving its concern for children. It needs a court system fast and well-resourced enough to prove that concern in practice.