According to a newspaper report on March 8, 2006 the President of Sri Lanka noted the existing corruption within government agencies and urged the Bribery and Corruption Investigation Commission to implement measures ‘more widely and extensively to check these tendencies’. One day prior to this, comments made by the Director General of the Bribery Commission together with the Inspector General of Police (IGP) regarding the level of corruption prevalent throughout Sri Lanka were quoted in the same newspaper. According to the Director General, 68 per cent of state officers are corrupt, while the IGP opined that if action was taken against all police officers who were corrupt, there would be none left in the department. Two weeks earlier, two senior judges resigned from their positions in the Judicial Service Commission due to matters of conscience.
In a World Bank Appraisal Report on aid assistance for judicial and legal reforms in Sri Lanka in 2000, the inefficiency of the Sri Lankan legal and judicial systems is analysed in great detail. The report attempts to contribute to the enhancement of managerial efficiency in the country, including private sector development. What is said in the report on private sector development is even more cogently applicable to the public sector.
Under these circumstances, if the president wishes to see transparency in dealing with corruption, a few preconditions must first be met. The core obstacle to dealing with corruption, as the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has constantly pointed out, is Sri Lanka’s defective justice administration system. And at the core of this defective system lies the delay in adjudication of all matters, particularly regarding criminal justice issues. If the criminal justice system itself is a sham, it cannot hope to address serious crimes such as fraud and corruption.
One of the elements of this sham is the nexus that exists between the police and criminal elements, to which the IGP earlier attributed the police inability to deal with drug lords. This issue should be taken seriously by the government, particularly as similar views have been expressed by other senior police officers, including the present Advisor on Police Affairs to the Ministry of Defence.
Having failed to deal with the primary issue of police corruption and misconduct, there is no reason to expect Sri Lanka’s justice system to competently address the elimination of fraud or to create transparency and accountability, as the president wishes. For the wish to become reality, it needs to be accompanied by a tangible work plan. There is no magic wand that can wave away the corruption afflicting Sri Lanka. The affliction can be cured only when delays in the administration of justice are addressed. Towards this end, the AHRC recommends the government to review the execution of the World Bank project on legal and judicial reforms, for which USD 18.2 million was proposed in 2000, and which is likely to have increased over the last five years. By examining this in a transparent manner, lessons can be learnt in order to address Sri Lanka’s other problems of corruption and delays in adjudication. Unless such concrete steps are taken to accompany the usual rhetoric, the country will become further mired in corruption and other ills.
