President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said on Sunday that his government will abide by the decisions of the judiciary and will not take decisions beyond them — a position he stated as a general principle of the rule of law, without naming any case.
“We submit to the decisions given by the judiciary. Do not expect any other decisions from us beyond that,” the President said, the Daily Mirror reported at 1.24 p.m.
He was addressing the Badulla District Women’s Conference, Hiru News reported at 1.13 p.m. Both outlets carry the same closing quotation in near-identical terms.
What he said
The President said the law is now being applied equally to everyone, and that those who had previously enjoyed privileges and the protection of the law were now protesting against the legal process.
“Today the law is equal for all. So what do those who got privileges from the old law, who got the protection of the law, who thought they would be punished before the law — what do they do? They start shouting against it. This is the situation,” he said in Hiru’s Sinhala account.
He then set out the chain of institutions in order: Parliament enacts the statutes; the Attorney General’s Department and the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption file cases under them; the Bribery Commission, the Criminal Investigation Department and the police conduct the investigations; and the judiciary decides. At the end of that chain, he said, sits the Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court gives a ruling. Once a ruling is given, some start shouting, ‘No, set that aside.’ Where is the rule of law then?” he asked.
A country could not function, he said, if judicial decisions were rejected whenever they did not suit particular groups. The government had entrusted the relevant institutions with the authority to enforce the law, and it respected the conclusions the judicial system reached.
Two live contexts — and neither filing names either
Neither the Daily Mirror nor Hiru connects these remarks to any specific case, and this desk is not asserting a connection on their behalf. But the President’s framing — that some demand a judicial decision be set aside — maps onto two disputes running at the same time, and readers will reach for both.
The first is the campaign to free Ven. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thera, whose demand is a presidential pardon: precisely a decision from the executive going beyond what a court has decided. That campaign’s satyagraha at Viharamahadevi Park entered its fourth day on Sunday, and this is the first reported comment by the President in that window.
It is also the same argument his own minister used two days earlier. Minister K.D. Lal Kantha ruled out a pardon on Friday on the ground that granting one would breach the government’s mandate on equality before the law — the identical reasoning the President advanced in Badulla.
One detail does not fit neatly. Gnanasara Thera’s imprisonment follows a Court of Appeal sentence, not a Supreme Court ruling, and this desk’s own record notes that an appeal has been filed before the Supreme Court in a related matter. A statement framed around Supreme Court rulings is therefore not an exact description of his case. Whether the President was speaking loosely about the courts in general, or deliberately pointing to an appeal that has not yet been decided, is not established by either filing.
The second context is the corruption prosecutions. The President’s reference to people “who got privileges from the old law” and “thought they would be punished”, and his enumeration of the Bribery Commission, the Attorney General’s Department and the CID, reads naturally as a description of the cases against former office-holders rather than of a religious dispute. The Daily Mirror’s account places that passage in exactly the same position.
Both readings are available from the same paragraph. The honest statement is that the President set out a rule and left its application unstated.
A governing-party platform, not a state occasion
The venue is worth recording. NewsFirst, reporting the Prime Minister’s speech at the same event, describes it as the Badulla Women’s Rally organised by the National People’s Power — the governing party — and the backdrop visible in Hiru’s photograph of the President carries NPP campaign branding alongside the conference name in Sinhala and Tamil.
Prime Minister Dr Harini Amarasuriya also addressed the conference, on education. A statement about the limits of executive power over judicial outcomes was therefore made from a party platform rather than from a state podium.
Update — the fuller speech: equal justice, drugs and the underworld
NewsFirst filed two further accounts of the same speech later on Sunday afternoon, at 3.10 p.m. and 2.35 p.m., which set the Supreme Court passage inside a longer argument. They are added here as sources rather than written up separately, because all three filings report one speech.
The argument: equal law is a child-safety policy
The President’s starting proposition was that all developed countries share one principle — that the law applies equally to everyone, NewsFirst reported.
From there he made an argument that is unusual in its construction: he treated equality before the law not as a constitutional abstraction but as a precondition for children’s physical safety. Education reforms alone cannot secure children’s future, he said; the rule of law matters as much. Even parents who protect and educate their children cannot guarantee their safety if those children grow up in a society where the law is not applied equally.
That line also links his speech directly to the Prime Minister’s at the same event. Dr Harini Amarasuriya had spoken on education reform and teacher recruitment; the President’s point was explicitly that her programme is not sufficient on its own.
He said Sri Lanka has long struggled with selective enforcement, with people who had political connections escaping legal action, and named three areas where he said political protection had prevented accountability: illegal tree felling, sand mining, and the production and sale of illegal drugs. He asked how children can be safe in a country where the law is applied according to a person’s status, wealth or political connections.
The President used a specific image for that condition: the law in Sri Lanka, he said, has been like a spider’s web, in which the weak are trapped while the powerful break through.
He acknowledged the change would not be easy, because those who had enjoyed protection and privileges under the old system do not want the law applied equally — they want to keep their own protection while others face its full force — and said such people are becoming increasingly agitated as the change proceeds. That is the same passage the Daily Mirror and Hiru report in the Supreme Court context above, and it now has a fuller setting.
The crime figures
In the second NewsFirst filing, the President warned that organised crime extends beyond drug trafficking, with armed criminal gangs recruiting members and carrying out shootings, NewsFirst reported.
He gave one set of figures. Within this year, he said, authorities have seized:
| Weapon | Seized this year |
|---|---|
| T-56 assault rifles | 93 |
| Pistols | 141 |
| Revolvers | 105 |
That is 339 firearms, of which more than a quarter are military assault rifles.
Asking what kind of country was being left to the next generation, the President said building a safe environment for children requires dismantling both the drug trade and the underworld — closing the argument back onto the equal-justice case he had opened with.
One reference this desk can place only tentatively
NewsFirst reports that the President also referred to a recent arrest of a suspect found in possession of a revolver, citing it as evidence of the threat from armed criminals. It does not identify the case.
Earlier the same morning, this desk reported the Colombo Crime Division’s seizure of an arms cache inside a Kirindiwela cinema — an inventory that included exactly one revolver, alongside two pistols, two other firearms, two live grenades and 3,843 rounds. That arrest was reported at 10.42 a.m.; the President spoke at about 2.35 p.m.
No filing links the two, and this desk does not assert that the President was referring to this case. It is recorded as the one candidate visible in the day’s reporting, and flagged as unconfirmed, because a reader who saw both stories will otherwise make the connection silently.
What the figures do and do not settle
A widely circulating summary of this speech also attributed to the President a set of drug seizure totals — thousands of kilograms of heroin, “Ice” and cocaine over a period running from October last year. When this article was first published, this desk could not confirm those figures against any reachable verified newsroom, and declined to report them. They are now confirmed. See the update below.
Update, later on October 18 — the drug figures confirmed, with three different clocks
Hiru News has since published a long extract of the speech in Sinhala, and it carries the drug seizure totals this desk had withheld, Hiru reported. The same filing independently reproduces the firearm figures above — 93 T-56 rifles, 141 pistols, 105 revolvers — matching the NewsFirst text exactly, which is a check on both accounts.
The drug totals, as the President gave them:
| Drug | Seized | Period as stated |
|---|---|---|
| Heroin | 2,484 kg | since 30 October last year |
| ”Ice” (methamphetamine) | 3,301 kg | ”as of yesterday” |
| Cocaine | 297 kg | ”within this year” |
The three figures do not run on the same clock, and that matters for anyone comparing them. The heroin total is dated from a specific day — 30 October 2025, the start of the government’s anti-drug drive — while the cocaine total is given as “within this year” and the Ice total simply as current. The seizures therefore cannot be added into a single annual total, and this partly answers a gap recorded below: for heroin at least, the period now has a start date. The President also said explicitly that the heroin figure “is not the total amount” seized.
The President’s own arithmetic does not hold on one of the three
To convey scale, the President converted each total into 50 kg fertiliser sacks. Two of the three conversions are right; one is not.
- Ice, 3,301 kg — he reached 66 sacks. 3,301 ÷ 50 = 66.0. Correct.
- Cocaine, 297 kg — he said about 6 sacks. 297 ÷ 50 = 5.9. Correct.
- Heroin, 2,484 kg — he reached “about 60 sacks”, working aloud: 1,000 kg is 20 sacks, 2,000 is 40, and then “500 is 20”. That last step is the error — 500 kg is 10 sacks, not 20. The correct conversion is about 50 sacks, not 60.
The slip overstates the heroin haul by roughly a fifth in the only terms a listener could picture. The underlying kilogram figure is unaffected.
The institutional claims
The fuller text also carries an argument none of the English filings reported: that the drug trade has captured specific state agencies. The President said a figure from the underworld can obtain three or four passports from the passport office, that a drug dealer can register four or five number plates for a single vehicle at the Motor Traffic Department, and that the same dealer can clear his own container through Customs. He named the Motor Traffic Department, Immigration and Customs, said “a handful” in the police had also become compromised, and described the result as a state operating inside the state.
He said the government would in future disclose how many schoolchildren have been arrested in drug cases, saying those detained include schoolgirls and employees of institutions the public holds in high regard.
The tentative Kirindiwela link is now stronger
The Hiru extract materially changes the identification flagged above. The President’s own words describe an arrest made that same day of a man found with a revolver and a pistol — NewsFirst had reported only a revolver — and in the same passage he refers to video of people being shot at for sport near Weliweriya, says “we know whose relative he is”, and names Kirindiwela.
This desk’s Kirindiwela cinema arms cache report, filed at 10.42 a.m. that morning, lists exactly one revolver and two pistols. The President naming Kirindiwela in the same breath as a revolver-and-pistol arrest is considerably stronger than the single-revolver coincidence first recorded. It is still not an explicit identification — he does not mention a cinema, a cache or grenades, and his syntax leaves it unclear whether “Kirindiwela” attaches to the arrest or to the relative he says he can identify. The link is upgraded from speculative to probable, not to confirmed.
Where he said it
Hiru also gives the occasion precisely: the “Our Government — Two Years, Good for the Country” Badulla District Women’s Convention, held at Senanayake Grounds, Badulla. The anti-drug campaign the President credited with the seizures was launched last year under a Sinhala slogan translating roughly as “the whole country together — get out”.
Ada Derana also filed on this speech but has returned an HTTP 403 from its content delivery network to this desk for 29 days, so its account could not be read or cited.
Not reported
Neither outlet reports which case or cases the President had in mind in the Supreme Court passage, and he is not reported to have been asked. Nothing in any of the four filings refers to Gnanasara Thera, to the satyagraha, to the hospitalisation of Ven. Balangoda Kassapa Thera on Saturday night, or to Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa’s demand that the President intervene.
No filing reports whether the President addressed the pardon power itself — a constitutional power of his office exercised independently of the courts — or whether “decisions beyond” judicial rulings was meant to cover it.
On the crime figures, the period’s starting date is now partly settled by the Hiru extract — the heroin total runs from 30 October last year — but the firearm figures and the cocaine total still rest on an undefined “within this year”, and the Ice total on “as of yesterday”. No filing gives the agencies credited with the seizures, how many arrests or prosecutions followed, or any comparison with previous years — so the 339 firearms cannot be read as a rise or a fall. None reports how many shootings the President attributed to organised gangs.
There is no reported response from the campaign, from the opposition, or from the Maha Sangha. No outlet published the full speech.
Update, 19 October: a fifth filing of the same speech adds a conspiracy claim and two unnamed TV channels
A Daily Mirror report filed the following morning carries a part of the same Badulla speech that no earlier filing reported: an allegation that groups are provoking racial and religious tension, and are using two television channels to do it.
The paper reported at 11 a.m. on Monday that the President, addressing the same NPP women’s rally in Badulla, said certain groups in both the North and the South were unwilling to accept the country’s growing national harmony and were attempting to provoke racism and communal clashes. He vowed the government would not allow attempts to reignite religious and racial tensions, and said it would not permit racist or extremist groups to regain political power or re-emerge as influential forces.
The television claim
The specific allegation is the sharpest new element. The President said certain groups were attempting to stir up public unrest through two television channels, in response to the government’s crackdown on corruption, drug trafficking and organised crime.
“Although there is no unrest at the grassroots level, certain groups are attempting to fuel it artificially through these two television channels,” he said.
He said those who had previously benefited from corrupt practices, drug networks and organised criminal activities were increasingly concerned about the government’s efforts to dismantle those operations, and that “old racist elements” unable to discuss democracy, economic development, education or fraud were now claiming the nation was in danger. He alleged that conspiracies were being orchestrated against the government, said previous administrations may have fallen victim to such schemes, and said the NPP would not be derailed by them — adding that unlike its predecessors it had to confront such attempts while simultaneously governing.
Why this sits with the rest of the speech
This is the fifth separate filing of one rally now cited by this article, after the Daily Mirror’s judiciary report, Hiru’s two and NewsFirst’s two. Each outlet led on a different passage; none carried this one. The pattern is the point — a reader who saw only one filing of this speech got a materially different account of what the President said in Badulla.
It also bears on the passage this article opened with. The President’s statement that the government will not take decisions beyond Supreme Court rulings was delivered, on the same platform, alongside an allegation that racist groups are trying to regain political power and are being amplified by broadcasters. Neither the Daily Mirror nor any other outlet connects the two, and this desk does not: the rule-of-law passage names no case, and the racial-tension passage names no group.
What is not reported. The two television channels are not named, by the President or the paper. No group, party or individual is named as provoking the tensions, and no evidence is cited for the claim. The alleged conspiracies are not described. The paper reports no response from any broadcaster, from the opposition, or from anyone the remarks might describe, and no regulatory step is reported as contemplated against any channel.
Sources: Daily Mirror, Hiru News (Sinhala), NewsFirst — equal justice, NewsFirst — drugs and gangs, Hiru News — drugs and the underworld, extended extract (Sinhala), Daily Mirror — racial and religious tensions.
