Thirty Special Determination petitions have been filed in the Supreme Court against the Sri Lanka Cricket Bill, Speaker Jagath Wickramaratne told Parliament on Tuesday morning.
The Speaker said he had received copies of the thirty petitions, the Daily Mirror reported in a filing by Yohan Perera at 10.00 a.m. In the same announcement he said he had also received copies of thirty petitions filed against the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill.
That is the whole of the Speaker’s announcement as reported. He did not name the petitioners, summarise their grounds, or say when the cricket petitions will be heard.
Why the count matters
A bill in Sri Lanka can be challenged in the Supreme Court only in the short window between being tabled in Parliament and being enacted, and only by way of a Special Determination. Copies of such petitions are transmitted to the Speaker, which is how the count reaches the House at all. The Speaker performed the same function on 8 September, when he gave Parliament a date-by-date breakdown of challenges to the 22nd Amendment alongside fifteen against the Anti-Corruption Bill.
Thirty challenges is a substantial number for a sports governance statute — the same figure the Speaker gave for a counter-terrorism bill that restructures bail, rehabilitation and restriction orders.
What the bill would do
The Sri Lanka Cricket Bill was published in the Government Gazette on 29 September, after Cabinet approval earlier in the month. It would place Sri Lanka Cricket on a statutory footing with a fourteen-member board — seven independent directors and seven elected — together with tiered voting rights, ministerial audit powers and reporting obligations to Parliament.
It is the tiered voting structure that has drawn most of the publicly reported objection. The bill confines voting at SLC general meetings to higher-category clubs and provincial associations, which critics say concentrates control of the national game in a small number of Colombo-based clubs.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror’s filing is two sentences long and this desk could not find a second verified newsroom reporting the Speaker’s cricket announcement at the time of writing. No filing names any of the thirty petitioners, states which clauses they attack, identifies the bench, or gives a hearing date. Nothing published says whether the Attorney General has responded, or whether the Supreme Court will hear the cricket petitions as a block in the way it is hearing the counter-terrorism petitions today.
Ada Derana, which has covered the earlier stages of this bill, could not be fetched — its CloudFront block on this host is now in its thirty-second day.
One caution on the count: the figure of thirty is the number of petitions the Speaker says he has received copies of, which is not necessarily the number the Supreme Court has listed. The same announcement produced a counter-terrorism figure that does not match the count reported from the court itself on the same morning.
Update, 21 October: three more, and the thirty is confirmed
The count is now thirty-three. Parliament has published the Speaker’s announcement of 21 October, in which he told the House he had received copies of “three more petitions filed at the Supreme Court in terms of the Article 121(1) of the Constitution in respect of the Bill titled ‘Sri Lanka Cricket’ in addition to the receipt of thirty Petitions mentioned in the announcement dated 20th of October 2026.”
That wording does two things. It puts the cricket total at thirty-three, and it confirms the thirty reported here from the Daily Mirror on Tuesday — the primary record and the newspaper agree on this bill.
They do not agree on the other half of Tuesday’s announcement. The Daily Mirror reported the Speaker giving thirty petitions against the counter-terrorism bill in the same breath as thirty against this one. Wednesday’s announcement instead cites “the twenty-five Petitions mentioned in the announcements dated 07th, 08th and 20th of October 2026” as its own baseline for the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill. The caution recorded above was therefore pointing at a real problem, but in the opposite direction to the one assumed: the suspect figure was the counter-terrorism thirty, not the court’s count. That bill’s running total is now thirty-six.
The Speaker also reported receiving a petition against the Immigration Bill. Neither the petitioners against this bill nor a hearing date for the cricket challenges have been reported.
