The Judicial Service Commission will recruit more than 1,600 court clerks to address staff shortages across the court system, and has Treasury approval to fill a total of 2,646 vacancies in courts islandwide, NewsFirst reported on Friday.
The open competitive examination is scheduled for Saturday at 14 examination centres set up in Colombo schools. The Commission said candidates for the vacant posts will be selected through both open and limited competitive examinations — the limited stream normally being reserved for serving public servants.
The Ministry of Finance has approved filling all 2,646 existing vacancies, the Commission said. NewsFirst does not explain the gap between that figure and the 1,600-plus posts covered by this recruitment round, or say when the remaining vacancies would be advertised.
The number that gives it scale
Clerical staffing is not a side issue in Sri Lanka’s courts. A Ministry of Justice count reported by this desk in May put 1,134,474 cases unresolved across the country’s courts as of 30 June 2025. Against that, 2,646 unfilled posts in the offices that index, schedule and move files is a direct constraint on throughput rather than an administrative detail.
Part of a wider staffing push
The Commission has been working the same problem from several directions this year. It set up new High Courts and recruited 33 magistrates in July as an efficiency measure. In October, Cabinet cleared 1,050 official email accounts for 350 courts under the eCourt programme — a decision that also turned to voice-to-text transcription specifically because of a shortage of stenographers.
Saturday’s examination addresses the same shortage with people rather than software, and it is the largest single clerical intake the Commission has announced this year.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not give the number of applicants sitting the examination, the breakdown between the open and limited streams, when results or appointments are expected, or how the 2,646 vacancies are distributed across court tiers and districts. No other verified newsroom had carried the announcement at the time of writing; searches across Daily Mirror, Ada Derana, Island, Daily FT, Colombo Gazette, EconomyNext and Daily News returned only unrelated coverage of judicial vacancies in the superior courts, which is a separate matter concerning judges.
