Forty trade unions and professional organisations signed a joint statement at Bar Association of Sri Lanka headquarters on Monday backing the BASL’s opposition to the proposed 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, and demanded that the government withdraw the bill.
Delegates from the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations, the Government Medical Officers’ Association, the Railway Station Masters’ Union, the All Island Graded Principals’ Union, the Postal Trade Union and the Government Nursing Officers’ Association gathered at the BASL to finalise the position, Hiru News reported.
Three demands
The meeting reached a set of decisions, according to Hiru. The organisations expressed unanimous opposition to the bill and called for its immediate withdrawal. They urged authorities to fill all vacant positions in the higher courts without delay. And they said that if the government nevertheless moves the amendment forward, it must be put to a national referendum.
A BASL press release summarising the shared concerns said that extending the retirement age of Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges poses a direct threat to judicial independence, the rule of law, democracy and public sovereignty. The bill would raise the retirement age of Supreme Court judges from 65 to 67 and of Court of Appeal judges from 63 to 65; the government has defended it as a measure to speed up the disposal of cases.
The referendum demand matches the BASL’s own long-stated position. The association has argued since the bill was gazetted that the change cannot be validly enacted without a vote, relying on the Supreme Court’s 2022 determination in SC SD 64-71/2022, which held that an amendment affecting the retirement age or period of office of sitting judges would impinge on judicial independence and violate Article 3.
A widening base
Monday’s signing marks a substantial broadening of the campaign beyond the legal profession. The Railway Station Masters’ Association became the first non-legal trade body to back the BASL when it issued a statement on Friday arguing that defending judicial independence was a duty of civil society rather than of lawyers alone. Three days later the number of organisations aligned with that position stands at 40.
The meeting also goes some way towards resolving a question left open by last week’s reporting. The Government Dental Surgeons’ Association denied on Monday that it had taken a position against the amendment, saying its representative had attended a BASL awareness meeting without endorsing the association’s stance. No outlet had said which other bodies attended that meeting. Hiru’s list is the first published account of the attendance, and the GDSA does not appear on it — though Hiru named only six of the 40 organisations, so its absence from that list is not evidence either way.
Hiru’s report also carries the GMOA as a signatory without qualification, consistent with the position attributed to it last week.
What has not been reported
Hiru named six of the 40 organisations. The full list has not been published by a verified newsroom, so it is not possible to say from the reporting which bodies made up the remaining 34, or whether the meeting Hiru describes is the same awareness meeting the GDSA referred to.
Ada Derana, the Daily Mirror, NewsFirst, EconomyNext and Colombo Gazette had not reported the joint statement at the time of writing, and the Bar Association has not published the statement in full. No government response has been reported.
Several aggregator sites did carry the meeting. Those accounts are not counted as verified sources here, and they include details — a larger list of named bodies among them — that no verified newsroom has published. They are not repeated here.
The five-judge Supreme Court bench appointed to hear the petitions against the amendment sits on Tuesday.
