Eminent former Chief Justice Neville Samarakoon has revealed extensive details regarding the history of subjecting the judiciary to political power.
During the J.R. Jayewardene administration in 1984, an impeachment motion was brought against the former Chief Justice following political interference in the judicial system. Below is an excerpt from an article published on the Lankadeepa website on January 15, 2025, detailing how he exposed these political pressures:
“Over the past year, we made every effort to fill 492 vacancies for Sinhala, Tamil, and English clerks, stenographers, typists, and bookbinders. Until December last year, we were ordered that recruitment had to be made through an entity known as the ‘Job Bank.’ However, nearly half of them could neither write nor type and were utterly unqualified for the positions they applied for. Some of them came carrying letters from MPs. Those letters went straight into the wastebasket. I had to inform the government that this system was unsuitable for the judiciary and that the Judicial Service Commission must be granted authority to recruit qualified candidates. The Job Bank was a fraud committed against the youth of this country. It was akin to a blood bank-we simply had to wait for donors to arrive.”
