Tuesday 21st July, 2026

The National Council for Road Safety (NCRS) is reportedly planning to launch a countrywide campaign to inspect vehicles in the public transport sector. This is something long overdue. The police, politicians and transport authorities spring into action in the aftermath of a tragic accident and formulate strategies to ensure road safety, but they lose interest in their ad hoc initiatives, with the passage of time. Road safety programmes should be sustained over the long term to produce the desired results.

Following the tragic Garandi Ella bus crash last year, transport authorities took action to ramp up vehicle roadworthiness and passenger safety regulations. They ordered mandatory condition checks on buses to prevent mechanical defects and driver fatigue from endangering the lives of passengers. But nothing has since been heard of that vehicle inspection programme.

There have been a couple of tragic road accidents during the past several days. Two lives were lost on Sunday when a car collided with a moving truck in Matara. Road fatality statistics are chilling. The police recorded 2,231 fatal accidents and 2,341 deaths in 2023, and the number of fatal accidents increased to 2,403, with 2,521 deaths, the following year. Last year, 2,597 fatal accidents claimed 2,746 lives. Road accidents in Sri Lanka claim an average of 2,500 to 2,700 lives annually.

Announcing that the inspection of public transport vehicles will get underway in September, the NCRS has identified drivers’ negligence and mechanical defects in vehicles as leading causes of road accidents. True, undisciplined drivers and vehicle defects are responsible for road accidents. However, there are other causative factors that must not be overlooked if roads are to be made safe. The causes of road accidents in Sri Lanka, identified by road safety experts, include speeding, distractions, recklessness, fatigue, driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics, inclement weather, inadequate road conditions, tailgating, improper lane changes, inexperience of drivers, overtaking dangerously, poor visibility, unroadworthy vehicles, lack of proper road signage, and jaywalking. One of these factors or a combination of them could lead to road accidents. Hence, a campaign to make roads safe should not be limited to drug screening and vehicle inspections.

Most buses operating in Sri Lanka are not purpose-built. They are truck chassis fitted with passenger vehicle bodies and seats. One wonders whether this could be the reason why bus owners and their workers treat passengers like cargo. Successive governments have not done anything about this issue though experts have pointed out that ‘truck-chassis buses’ cannot provide the comfort, stability and safety of the buses built specifically for transporting people. In this country, transporting cattle in cramped conditions is a punishable offence. The police take trucks with cattle packed tightly in them into custody and prosecute their drivers and owners––and rightly so. But no such action is taken against overcrowded buses.

The NCRS programme to inspect public transport vehicles should be coupled with regular random drug screening. Some bus and truck drivers are addicted to drugs. According to media reports, a raid at the Bastian Mawatha private bus terminal in Colombo some time ago, revealed that nearly 18 percent of the drivers and conductors were under the influence of narcotic drugs. Similar inspections in Piliyandala, Horana, Nugegoda and Navinna also resulted in the arrest of several drivers and conductors who tested positive for substances such as heroin, cannabis and crystal methamphetamine, commonly known as “ice”. Truck drivers must also be subjected to regular random drug screening. They are also responsible for many road accidents.

The NCRS vehicle inspection programme is bound to run into stiff resistance from the private bus operators who have become a law unto themselves. Many passenger buses, both private and state-owned, are badly maintained and therefore unroadworthy. Truckers are also likely to protest. It is hoped that the transport authorities and the police will have the courage to tell such bus and truck operators where to get off.

Monday 20th July, 2026

The Court of Appeal (CA) has granted bail to a man held on remand for about 15 years under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). The CA overturned a Colombo High Court order refusing bail to the accused. Stressing that protracted pre-trial detention should not amount to punishment before conviction, and the presumption of innocence remains a cornerstone of criminal justice, the court ruled that there was an exceptional circumstance warranting the accused’s release on bail in keeping with an amendment introduced to the PTA in 2022. However, this amendment has not effectively diluted the draconian character of the PTA to make it rights-compliant; its sweeping powers leave room for abuse. A country needs anti-terror laws to ensure national security and public safety, but they must necessarily conform to international human rights standards and best practices.

It is sad but true that successive governments, bent on suppressing democratic dissent, have manipulated the legal system to ‘punish’ their political opponents by having them remanded or detained for extended periods. They unashamedly invoke the PTA, the Offences against Public Property Act, etc., for this purpose. One can understand why dangerous criminals who pose a threat to public safety are detained for extended periods, but it defies comprehension why others, especially political activists, should be detained or held on remand indefinitely purportedly until the conclusion of investigations. The practice of the police arresting suspects even before investigations into complaints get underway in earnest to ascertain evidence, and having them remanded or detained for long periods, has severely eroded public confidence in the legal system. It must be discontinued forthwith.

In this country, detention is tantamount to punishment for all intents and purposes. Imagine being kept in an overcrowded, squalid prison, where sanitary facilities are scarce and inmates cannot sleep for want of space. Some remand prisoners are housed with convicts. They live in eternal fear of being assaulted or even killed. All 21 inmates killed during the recent riots at the Negombo Prison, which accommodated remand prisoners and convicts, were suspects, as we reported, quoting prison officers, last Wednesday (15). The majority of the injured inmates were also suspects. This alone is proof of the vulnerability of remand prisoners.

There is no gainsaying that Sri Lanka’s prison system is badly in need of a radical shake-up, which remains pie in the sky despite promises made by successive governments to introduce comprehensive prison reforms. The need for much more space and better facilities for the current prison population cannot be overstated. There are more than 41,000 prisoners at present although the prison system has a capacity to hold only 10,000 to 11,000 inmates, according to the government. The Negombo Prison, which was designed to accommodate about 650 prisoners, was holding around 2,400 inmates at the time of the recent riots. However, the physical development of prisons alone will not help evolve a lasting solution to the ever-worsening issue of overcrowding. It is imperative to formulate a comprehensive strategy to overcome the problem and adopt the modern methods already used by other countries.

One may recall that various alternative measures have been proposed, over the past so many years, to ease prison overcrowding due to pre-trial remand or detention. They include expanding bail, introducing electronic monitoring for those who pose no serious risks to the public. They are already used internationally, and Sri Lanka can adopt them easily by introducing necessary legal amendments.

What one gathers from the various views expressed by experts during the previous debates on prison reforms is that well-designed community sanctions can reduce reoffending more effectively than short jail terms. They make sense in that they help not only reduce prison overcrowding and escalating costs but also prevent those convicted for minor offences from networking with criminals in prisons and graduating to serious crimes.

Sri Lanka’s legal fraternity has woken up to threats to democracy and embarked on a campaign to neutralise them. The Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) is leading the battle against the incumbent government’s efforts to undermine democracy and judicial independence. It deserves praise for its laudable mission, whose success however hinges on the cooperation of all other stakeholders.

Former BASL President Saliya Pieris, speaking at the launch of Dr. Jayampathy Wickramaratne’s book, Constitutional Conversations, in Colombo on Thursday (16), inter alia, pointed out that democracy had to be protected from the elected representatives of people as well. He must have struck a responsive chord with the discerning public when he said democracy faced graver threats under governments with steamroller majorities.

The wellbeing of democracy is inversely proportional to the concentration of unchecked political power, as evident from the experience of countries like Sri Lanka, where legal and institutional constraints are absent or inherently weak and ineffective. However, a distinction has to be made between state capacity and arbitrary, unchecked state power. Mature democracies often combine extensive democratic freedoms with highly capable states, rather than weak ones, as some political scientists have argued.

So, one may say, with apologies to Shakespeare, the fault is neither in state capacity nor in our stars, but in ourselves and the legal and institutional safeguards in place to protect democracy. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has failed in his constitutional duty by leaving four vacancies each in the Supreme Court (SC) and the Court of Appeal (CA) unfilled for months, as legal experts have pointed out, but there is nothing that can be done to ensure that he does what the Constitution requires him to do. Who says the culture impunity came to an end with the 2024 regime change?

Mammoth parliamentary majorities not only undermine democracy but also become the undoing of the governments that command them. This has been Sri Lanka’s experience since 1970, when the SLFP-led United Front government secured a two-thirds majority (with the help of the JVP, which conducted its propaganda campaign). That administration bulldozed its way through and even extended its parliamentary term by two years. The UNP, which obtained a five-sixths majority at the 1977 general election, debilitated all legal and institutional constraints, and democracy suffered immensely under its rule as never before. Political violence and election malpractices came to be institutionalised. That regime made a general election disappear in 1982 with the help of a heavily rigged referendum. The SLFP-led UPFA government mustered a two-thirds majority after winning the 2010 general election and went to the extent of amending the Constitution to further the interests of the then Executive President by weakening the constitutional safeguards that had been introduced to ensure the independence of vital state institutions. The SLPP government, elected in 2020, abused its two-thirds majority to amend the Constitution to strengthen the executive presidency at the expense of democratic institutions. The arrogance of power made that regime impervious to public opinion and economic reality, and the economy went into a tailspin, leading to political upheavals. That supermajority turned out to be the SLPP government’s undoing as well as a curse for the country.

The JVP-led NPP, which capitalised on public anger and came to power on the back of a massive protest vote, in 2024, thinks no end of itself mainly because of its two-thirds majority. President Dissanayake has been accused of planning to amend the Constitution to increase the retirement ages of the superior court judges with an ulterior motive. He continues to ignore calls for abandoning his ill-conceived plan and filling the vacancies in the SC and the CA.

Democracy suffered extensive damage under previous governments with supermajorities, which were abused in every conceivable manner to advance the political agendas of the political leaders of the day. Now, another juggernaut is bearing down on democracy. The political Opposition is too pusillanimous to stand up to the powerful JVP-NPP government; its leaders bellow rhetoric but baulk at taking up the cudgels for democracy. Their bark is worse than their bite. Only a few individual Opposition politicians have had the courage to oppose the ongoing assault on democracy and educate the public on the excesses committed by the present-day leaders. As a result, the BASL, the independent media, and some civil society outfits have had to act as a countervailing force against the government, which is now doing exactly what it condemned previous governments for doing.