Police are moving to a digital system for reviewing case files sent to the Attorney General’s Department, in an effort to speed up files on which advice has been delayed.
For 2025 and 2026 combined, a total of 3,165 case files were referred to the Attorney General for advice, police said. Advice has been received on 2,871 of them. Another 294 files are still outstanding — 9.3 percent of the total.
Police said close coordination is being maintained with the Attorney General’s Department on the change.
The report gives no start date for the system, does not say who is building it or what it will cost, and does not indicate how long the 294 outstanding files have been waiting. No official from either the police or the Attorney General’s Department is quoted by name.
Why it matters
An Attorney General’s advice is the gate a criminal file must pass before charges can be filed in the higher courts. Where that advice is slow, the investigation is finished but the prosecution cannot begin, and the delay is invisible in court statistics because the case has not yet reached a court.
The bottleneck is a long-standing one. Around 70 Senior State Counsel handle criminal matters referred from across the country, and the department has repeatedly been identified in Parliament as a choke point in the justice system.
Supreme Court Justice Yasantha Kodagoda described delay in the administration of justice as the “slow poison of our entire system of justice” in an address to the Bar Association in May, arguing that the cause was the volume of work and the limited human-resource capacity of the system rather than delay on the part of practising lawyers.
Digitisation has been tried elsewhere in the chain. The Supreme Court held its first fully paperless trial in March, with charge sheets and case files signed, uploaded and accessed electronically.
A single-source report
This account rests on NewsFirst alone. No other verified newsroom had reported the police statement at the time of writing, and the figures above have not been independently confirmed. They are internally consistent: 3,165 less 2,871 leaves 294, which is 9.3 percent of the total.
