The Cabinet has approved official digital communication facilities for 350 courts across the country under the government’s e-Court programme — a decision that covers 1,050 email accounts, voice-to-text transcription and video conferencing, rather than email alone.
The proposal was submitted by the Minister of Justice and National Integration and is aimed at accelerating the rollout of the e-Court system, the Daily Mirror reported. It builds on a framework the Cabinet approved on 15 December 2025 to establish a comprehensive digital system for the courts, under which digital case-file management systems are being developed for Magistrates’ Courts, District Courts and High Courts.
What the facilities actually are
The 1,050 accounts are to run under the official courts.gov.lk domain and will be hosted through the email system already used by the Ministry of Justice and National Integration, Newswire reported. Official email is to be extended to officers at all levels of the judicial system.
Two further capabilities are being built into the same system, and they are the substantive part of the decision:
- Voice-to-text transcription, to convert oral statements into written documents immediately. This is explicitly aimed at the existing shortage of stenographers in the courts — a long-standing constraint on how fast hearings can be recorded and transcripts produced.
- Video conferencing, to allow proceedings to be conducted online where existing legal provisions already permit it.
Read as “digital communication facilities”, the decision sounds administrative. The transcription component is the one that touches how quickly cases move.
Where this sits in a longer programme
This is one stage in a project that has been advancing in increments rather than a single launch, and the stages are easy to confuse with one another. The December 2025 Cabinet framework established the digital court system; case-file management systems for the three court tiers are still under development; and this week’s approval covers the communications layer — accounts, transcription and conferencing — that those systems need to run on.
The Justice Ministry has also been discussing judicial digitisation with foreign counterparts, and the decision came from the same Cabinet sitting that approved the visa-free travel agreement with Thailand.
Not reported
Neither filing gives a cost for the facilities, a timeline for when the accounts, transcription or conferencing will be in place, or which supplier will provide the voice-to-text capability. Whether the transcription system will support Sinhala and Tamil proceedings — the question that determines how much of the stenographer shortage it can actually relieve — is not addressed. There is no indication of how many of the 350 courts already have the connectivity the system assumes, and no comment from the Judicial Service Commission or the Ministry of Justice beyond the Cabinet announcement itself.
