The Cabinet has approved publishing the Community-Based Corrections (Amendment) Bill in the Government Gazette and then presenting it to Parliament, clearing the last administrative step before a law aimed at repeat offenders reaches the floor.
The bill amends the Community-Based Corrections Act, No. 46 of 1999, with the stated aim of strengthening the legal framework for dealing with people who commit offences repeatedly, Ada Derana reported. The draft was prepared by the Legal Draftsman and has since been cleared by the Attorney General. Tuesday’s proposal was submitted by the Minister of Justice and National Integration.
The measure has been a long time coming. Ada Derana reported that Cabinet first approved updating the Act’s provisions at a meeting held on 7 April 2025 — roughly seventeen months before the bill was cleared for the Gazette.
A second track: serving sentences at home
At the same weekly Cabinet media briefing at the Department of Government Information, Cabinet Spokesperson Minister Nalinda Jayatissa said separate legislation is being drafted to let certain convicted people serve their sentences under house arrest rather than in prison.
“Alongside a number of ongoing reforms in the judicial system, this legal reform is also being pursued,” Jayatissa said, according to Ada Derana. “Discussions are underway and legislation is being drafted on several measures, including reducing overcrowding in prisons, expediting reports from the Government Analyst’s Department, introducing necessary legal reforms to grant bail to individuals who are unable to secure bail, and allowing certain individuals to serve their sentences outside prison under house arrest.”
He placed the judges’ retirement age question inside the same programme: “The proposal to increase the retirement age of judges is also being considered within this broader framework of judicial reforms.”
The two measures point in opposite directions
Community-based corrections is the existing mechanism for non-custodial sentences — supervised work and reporting orders served in the community instead of prison. Tuesday’s amendment is framed not as widening that route but as tightening it for people who reoffend.
The house-arrest work runs the other way, toward keeping more people out of prison. Ada Derana’s accounts do not reconcile the two, and neither report says whether they form parts of a single sentencing package or are separate initiatives that happened to be announced on the same morning.
What has not been reported
Neither report gave the substance of the corrections amendment: what changes for repeat offenders, whether it lengthens supervision, restricts eligibility for community orders, or creates new penalties. Nor has the government published a date for the bill’s first reading.
On house arrest, Jayatissa gave no draft, no timetable, no indication of which offences or sentence lengths would qualify, and no description of how compliance would be monitored — the questions that have followed the proposal since it first surfaced.
Context
House arrest has been under discussion for months without legislation appearing. The government first raised it as an answer to prison overcrowding in July, and said in early August that legal provisions were being drafted. Tuesday’s briefing repeats that the drafting is under way rather than announcing that it is done.
Overcrowding remains the underlying pressure. Ada Derana has separately reported that a majority of remand prisoners face drug-related charges, and the Justice Minister said on Tuesday that there would be no leniency for drug dealers — a position that sits awkwardly beside a policy of moving sentenced people out of prisons.
Jayatissa’s linking of judicial retirement ages to the same reform programme mirrors the argument the government is making abroad, where Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath has told the Human Rights Council that the tenure extension answers the UN’s own recommendations on court delays.
Hiru News carried the Cabinet decision on Tuesday under the heading “Community Corrections act to be amended”, confirming the approval from a second newsroom but adding no detail on what the amendment changes.
