A magistrate has referred the Inspector General of Police to the Court of Appeal for contempt proceedings, after the police answered a court order to issue a nationwide circular by producing guidelines that covered three police divisions.

Gampaha Magistrate Bandula Gunarathna directed the court registrar on 21 October to forward the case files concerning the IGP to the President of the Court of Appeal, to initiate contempt of court proceedings over the alleged failure to comply with court orders, the Daily Mirror reported at 8.23 p.m.

The case that produced the order

The directive arose from the prosecution of Chamara Chathuranga Marasinghe, a resident of Delowewa, Makandana, against whom the Gampaha Anti-Corruption Unit had filed drug possession charges under case numbers 1743 and 1744.

Hiru News, filing in Sinhala at 8.46 p.m., supplies a detail the Daily Mirror leaves out and which explains the court’s reaction: the two cases were filed against the same man on the same day. That is what the court examined, and what it found to be vexatious.

The court found the charges baseless. It ordered three police officers and the Police Department to pay Marasinghe Rs. 200,000 in compensation.

It went further than compensating one man. The Magistrate directed the IGP to issue a nationwide circular instructing police officers not to institute frivolous cases against innocent people — treating the case not as an isolated error but as something requiring a service-wide instruction.

Despite being given sufficient time, the Police Department failed to issue the circular.

What the police produced instead

At Wednesday’s proceedings, lawyers for the Police Legal Division submitted a set of guidelines issued on 19 October by the Deputy Inspector General of Police in charge of Western Province North.

Those guidelines applied only to the Gampaha, Kelaniya and Negombo police divisions.

The Magistrate, examining the document, criticised the police for submitting instructions limited to a few divisions when the court had specifically ordered a circular covering the entire country. He said the move appeared to be an attempt to mislead the court, and questioned why the comprehensive circular had not been issued as directed.

That phrase is the centre of the case. The police did not ignore the order outright — they responded two days before the hearing with a document that resembles compliance. The Magistrate’s finding is that producing a partial instrument in answer to a national order is worse than producing nothing, because it is offered as though it satisfied the order.

The three divisions covered are also the ones nearest this court. The instruction reaches the officers who appear before the Gampaha bench and stops there.

Hiru puts the Magistrate’s objection in a sharper form. He pointed out that his order had been directed to the IGP — and that issuing instructions at provincial level therefore did not implement it. The defect is not only that the guidelines are too narrow geographically, but that they came from the wrong officer. A DIG cannot discharge an order made against the head of the service.

The reasoning the Magistrate gave

The Daily Mirror reports the Magistrate going beyond the compliance failure to the policy behind it.

Warning of the consequences of unwarranted arrests and baseless prosecutions, he questioned the sustainability of a system that encouraged the accumulation of cases instead of addressing the underlying causes of crime — and expressed concern about the effect of such conduct on public confidence in law enforcement and the judiciary.

That is an argument about incentives. A system measured by cases filed will produce cases filed, including against people against whom there is nothing; the compensation order and the circular were both directed at that, and only the compensation has been paid.

What happens next

The referral is not itself a finding of contempt. The Magistrate has sent the files to the President of the Court of Appeal, which is the court with jurisdiction to punish contempt. Whether proceedings are instituted, and against whom, is for that court.

Note what is being referred: the alleged non-compliance of the office of the IGP with a judicial directive — not the conduct of the three officers in the original case, which the court has already dealt with by way of compensation.

A caution on searching this story. This is not the only contempt matter involving the police leadership currently in the archive, and they should not be confused. A separate contempt proceeding involving the Criminal Investigations and Crimes Bureau and MP Wimal Weerawansa is recorded at Contempt probe over the IGP’s conduct; the court, the magistrate and the underlying case are all different. No filing links the two, and this desk is not linking them.

Not reported

The Daily Mirror does not name the IGP in the report, state whether he was represented at Wednesday’s proceedings in his own right, or say whether the Police Legal Division offered any explanation for the limited scope of the 19 October guidelines.

It does not say when the original compensation order and circular directive were made, how much time the police were given to comply, or whether the Rs. 200,000 compensation has been paid. It does not name the DIG for Western Province North, give the content of the guidelines beyond their geographical scope, or say when the Court of Appeal is expected to take up the files.

No response from the Police Department or the IGP’s office to the referral had been reported at the time of writing. Neither filing names the IGP, and neither reports whether the Attorney-General’s Department has been notified.

On sourcing. Two verified newsrooms have filed, independently and 23 minutes apart, and they agree on every particular — the magistrate, the referral to the President of the Court of Appeal, the compensation order, the defendant’s name and address, the three police divisions, and the finding that the response did not comply. Ada Derana could not be checked, its site having returned a CloudFront block to this desk for more than a month.

Sources: Daily Mirror, Hiru News (Sinhala).