A total of 1,134,474 cases remain unresolved across Sri Lanka’s 293 courts as of 30 June 2025, according to a Ministry of Justice report cited by Mawbima newspaper and reported by Newswire on Saturday, underscoring the scale of the country’s persistent judicial backlog.
The Magistrate’s Courts carry by far the largest share, with 818,869 cases pending — roughly 72% of the national total. District Courts have 260,007 cases awaiting resolution, while the Supreme Court has 5,396 and the Court of Appeal 5,216. The Civil Appellate High Court lists 6,591 pending cases and the Commercial High Court 6,330.
Criminal cases at High Court level account for 27,376 pending matters, the report said. Children’s Magistrate’s Courts have 1,556 cases, while Labour Tribunals have 3,131. A further 65 contempt of court matters remain awaiting settlement.
The scale of the backlog reinforces longstanding concerns about access to justice in Sri Lanka, where delays at Magistrate’s and District court level frequently translate into multi-year waits for civil and minor criminal matters to be heard. The figures form part of a broader debate over judicial reform and resourcing that has gathered pace in recent months alongside high-profile accountability cases at the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal — including ongoing scrutiny of the shopping bag tax channelling petition, the Galle Fort police apology in court and the Yoshitha Rajapaksa money laundering trial.
The Ministry of Justice has previously flagged that the heavy load at the lower courts is a primary obstacle to clearing older case files, and recent budgets have proposed expanded recruitment of judicial officers and digitalisation pilots. The published figures do not include any breakdown by year of filing, leaving the question of how long the oldest cases have been pending unanswered in the present report.
Source: Newswire.
