Former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva has described the six-year prison sentence imposed on Ven. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thera as unlawful, alleging that the case involved a conspiracy, the Daily Mirror reported at 9.12 p.m. on Tuesday.

Silva, whom the paper identifies as a former Chief Justice, was addressing a Buddhist event.

“The sentence imposed on Ven. Gnanasara Thera is completely illegal. I have studied this matter closely, and there is a significant conspiracy involved here.”

The judge he is describing now heads the judiciary

The Daily Mirror attributes the sentence to “former Court of Appeal President Justice Preethi Padman Surasena”, and says Silva argued it exceeded the maximum he believed the applicable law permitted.

That description is accurate about 2018 but incomplete about today. Preethi Padman Surasena is the sitting Chief Justice of Sri Lanka — the office Silva himself once held. This desk has reported on him in that capacity twice in recent months: on the Bar Association’s statement that judicial independence is not a shield against scrutiny, and on the Commonwealth Lawyers Association president’s concerns about the 22nd Amendment bench, both of which turned on parliamentary remarks about Surasena.

So this is not only a former judge criticising an old judgment. It is a former Chief Justice publicly alleging that a sentence imposed by the current Chief Justice was illegal and procedurally tainted. The filing does not make that point, and readers working from it alone would not know the two offices connect.

The three claims

On the referral. Silva questioned how the matter reached the Court of Appeal at all, saying a Magistrate had written to its President asking for a harsher sentence because the Magistrate’s own sentencing powers were limited.

“Since when does a Magistrate write to the President of the Court of Appeal? Can a Magistrate really write to the President of the Court of Appeal asking him to exercise his judicial authority to impose a harsher sentence because the punishment within his own jurisdiction is insufficient?”

On what the monk said. Silva disputed the interpretation placed on Gnanasara Thera’s remarks at the Homagama Magistrate’s Court. On his account the monk had gone to the court out of concern for Army officers who remained in detention and had appealed for their release, rather than attacking the Magistrate personally. The remarks about war heroes being imprisoned while LTTE members were released came during an emotional exchange, he said, and the reference to being “spineless” was directed at officials of the government, not at a judicial officer.

On the record. Silva said the Magistrate made no contemporaneous note of the incident and entered a written record roughly a month later.

“Normally, if an act of contempt occurs, a record is made immediately.”

What the record already shows

The Daily Mirror does not set the claims against the case history. Our archive does, and one fact bears directly on the central allegation.

The conviction arises from Gnanasara Thera’s conduct at the Homagama Magistrate’s Court on 25 January 2016, during proceedings on the disappearance of journalist Prageeth Ekneligoda. The Court of Appeal convicted him on four counts on 8 August 2018 and imposed terms totalling 19 years, to run concurrently as six.

The Supreme Court upheld that judgment on 5 October 2018. The legality of the sentence Silva now calls “completely illegal” was therefore tested on appeal at the time — by the Supreme Court, the court he once headed — and affirmed. Neither the Daily Mirror’s filing nor Silva’s reported remarks address that appeal.

The sentence was then erased by a presidential pardon from Maithripala Sirisena, under which the monk left Welikada Prison on 23 May 2019 having served roughly nine months. The Supreme Court struck that pardon down as arbitrary and invalid on 10 September 2026, on a fundamental rights petition brought by a group including Sandhya Ekneligoda, the missing journalist’s wife — the same case whose 2016 hearing produced the contempt charges. He returned to Welikada on 5 October when the Court of Appeal ordered the balance of the term to run.

One point of Silva’s account does align with the record rather than cut against it. The “Army officers” he says the monk was concerned about fit the Ekneligoda proceedings, in which military intelligence officers were among those charged over the disappearance. That is context the filing leaves implicit.

The paper’s own caveat

The Daily Mirror carries an unusually direct qualification, which this desk repeats rather than paraphrases: Silva’s statements represent his legal interpretation of the case, and his claims concerning the legality of the sentence, the court proceedings and an alleged conspiracy have not been independently established.

Nothing here establishes them either. What the archive adds is not a rebuttal of Silva’s reading of the statute, which no filing sets out in enough detail to test, but the appellate history the claim has to contend with.

Context

The remarks land in a week of sustained public pressure over the monk’s imprisonment. Opposition leaders alleged on Monday that his robes were removed under pressure from the NPP leadership; the Maha Sangha is walking from Kandy to Colombo demanding his release; and former President Ranil Wickremesinghe has explained the 2019 pardon as a response to monks’ objections.

Not reported

The filing does not name the Buddhist event Silva was addressing, or say who organised it. It does not identify the statutory maximum he says was exceeded, name the Magistrate he accuses of writing to the Court of Appeal, or reproduce the letter. It carries no response from the Court of Appeal, the Judicial Service Commission, the Attorney General’s Department or the Bar Association, and no indication that Silva has filed or intends to file anything in court — his remarks were made at a public event, not in proceedings. It does not say whether he acts for the monk in any capacity.

Nor does any filing this desk could read address the obvious question raised by the sequence: how an argument that the sentence was unlawful stands against the Supreme Court’s 2018 affirmation of it, or whether any avenue to reopen that judgment remains.

Source: Daily Mirror.