The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Employment and Tourism will open its consular counter on three consecutive Saturdays for people who need documents attested urgently, the Daily Mirror reported on Thursday evening.
The service will run on 17, 24 and 31 October, from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., and only at the Consular Affairs Division head office in Battaramulla. The ministry said it will not be offered at the regional offices.
Attendance is by appointment only. Applicants must book in advance through the government’s e-Channeling system before turning up.
Who this affects
Foreign Ministry attestation is the step that makes a Sri Lankan document usable abroad. Educational certificates, marriage certificates, police clearances and employment contracts all pass through this counter before they can be recognised by a foreign authority, which puts departing migrant workers, students and emigrants — particularly those bound for Gulf states — at the front of the queue for it.
That the ministry is adding Saturdays at all indicates weekday capacity is not clearing the demand. The filing does not say so, and gives no figure for waiting times or backlog.
The regional offices named out of it
The exclusion is more specific than it looks. The ministry runs five Regional Consular Offices — in Jaffna, Trincomalee, Kandy, Matara and Kurunegala — and those are exactly the offices that, together with Battaramulla, had all attestation services suspended in May when the Electronic Document Attestation System (e-DAS) failed.
That suspension was open-ended: the ministry said it was working with technical providers to restore e-DAS but gave no timeline, and told applicants holding e-Channeling appointments to watch that platform for updates. e-Channeling is the booking channel again now, which indicates the system is operating.
Whether the Saturday sittings are clearing a backlog that dates from that failure, or responding to ordinary seasonal demand, is not stated in Thursday’s announcement, and no filing this desk could find connects the two.
Not reported
The ministry does not define what counts as “urgent”, say whether any proof of urgency is required, or indicate how many appointment slots exist on each Saturday. Nothing is said about fees — whether the special sitting carries a surcharge or is charged at the normal rate.
No reason is given for limiting the service to the Battaramulla head office, and nothing is reported about whether users in the north, east and south who would normally use a regional office are expected to travel to Colombo. The announcement covers three Saturdays in October only, and does not say whether the arrangement will be extended into November.
This report rests on a single newsroom. Searches of Ada Derana, NewsFirst, Hiru News, the Island, Daily FT, Colombo Gazette and the government’s own news.lk returned no corresponding announcement at the time of writing, and the ministry’s own website carried no notice of it. Ada Derana has been unreachable from this desk for twenty-seven consecutive days.
