Colombo Chief Magistrate Asanga S. Bodaragama on Friday refused to lift the order requiring monks at the Viharamahadevi Park satyagraha to leave — and in the same sitting refused the Attorney General’s request for arrest warrants against them.

Two motions were filed before the court on Friday, Hiru News reported at 3.03 p.m. One came from the group holding the protest, which asked that Thursday’s order be withdrawn or varied. The other came from the Attorney General.

The magistrate rejected both. The order issued on the 22nd cannot be changed, he ruled, and if it is breached the police may take legal action as required under the Penal Code.

The Daily Mirror, filing 28 minutes later, supplies what the Attorney General’s motion was for: the issuance of arrest warrants. That request was rejected too.

Neither side got what it asked for

The shape of the ruling matters more than either half of it. The monks did not get the order lifted, so the direction to vacate the park stands. The state did not get warrants, so there is no instrument compelling anyone’s removal today. What the court left in place is a standing order the protesters are not obeying and a general power for police to prosecute under the Penal Code if they choose to use it.

That is the same position the police were in on Thursday night, when officers from Cinnamon Gardens (Kurunduwatta) Police read the order out at the park and then withdrew without removing anyone. The sit-in continued into its eighth day on Friday.

A photograph published by Hiru with its report shows the scale of what the order addresses: tents pitched on the paving around the park’s Buddha statue, bedding mats laid out, and monks and lay supporters seated among them. The protest is an encampment, not a gathering.

What the campaign wants

The satyagraha demands the release of Ven. Galagodaatte Gnanasara Thera, who is serving a sentence for contempt of court. It has already been restricted once before: a Fort magistrate on 16 October barred 54 people connected to it, 30 of them monks, from the area around the Presidential Secretariat, and the park is the site the campaign moved to.

The UNP attacks the removal of monks’ names from an earlier order

The campaign drew its first party-political intervention of the week on Friday. The United National Party issued a statement saying that a decision to remove the names of monks from the court order taken against those who had walked from Kandy and remained near the Presidential Secretariat seeking Gnanasara Thera’s release amounted to a deliberate and serious wrong, Hiru News reported at 4.39 p.m.

The party’s argument runs in two parts. It asks why the names of monks not involved in the process were included in the order in the first place, and says that removing them afterwards amounts to misleading the court. Those are competing complaints — the first says the list was over-inclusive, the second says correcting it was improper — and the statement does not reconcile them.

The UNP also says that figures prominent in the current government previously supported protests held near the Presidential Secretariat, and asks why those who backed such protests then are taking the opposite approach now. It adds that the government attempts to attack Buddhism and the Maha Sangha at every opportunity.

The order the statement refers to is the Fort magistrate’s of 16 October, which barred 54 people, 30 of them monks, from the area around the Presidential Secretariat — not Thursday’s Viharamahadevi Park order at issue in Friday’s hearing.

Hiru does not say who made the decision to remove the names, when it was made, how many names were removed, or on what application. No UNP official is named or quoted directly, and no response from the government or the Attorney General’s Department is reported.

Not reported

Neither filing gives the case number, names who applied for Thursday’s order, or says what grounds the monks advanced for varying it. Neither says why the Attorney General sought warrants nor on what basis the magistrate declined them — a refusal of the state’s own application that both outlets record without explaining. Neither says what happens at the next sitting, or whether there is one.