Sri Lanka is witnessing an extraordinary period of investigations, arrests, court appearances and prosecutions involving some of the most recognisable names in public life. That is precisely when the institutions of justice must demonstrate something larger than their ability to arrest the powerful: consistency, independence, speed and scrupulous respect for due process.
There is a seductive simplicity to an arrest. The police arrive. A prominent figure is questioned. Cameras gather outside. The suspect is produced before court. Within minutes the photographs are everywhere. It looks like accountability. But accountability is considerably more difficult than that.
Sri Lanka is presently seeing a succession of investigations involving former political office-holders and other powerful figures. None of those developments establishes guilt. That sentence is not a technicality inserted to satisfy lawyers. It lies at the heart of a functioning justice system.
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The State has every right to investigate credible evidence of corruption, bribery, money laundering or misuse of public property. Where evidence exists, failing to investigate because the suspect is wealthy, famous or politically connected would itself undermine equality before the law.
But the same principle requires equal treatment in the other direction. Political prominence cannot provide immunity from investigation. Neither should political identity make someone easier to prosecute.
That is why what happens after an arrest matters far more than the spectacle of the arrest itself. Was the investigation properly conducted? Is there documentary evidence? Can the money trail be established? Were witnesses questioned fairly? Was exculpatory material considered as seriously as incriminating material? Can prosecutors prove every element of the alleged offence? And can they do it within a reasonable time?
Justice is not only about pursuing the powerful. It is also about the virtually anonymous person sitting inside a remand prison waiting for a laboratory report. It is about the complainant waiting years for a trial. It is about the accused who may ultimately be acquitted.
If the present wave of anti-corruption investigations produces carefully prepared prosecutions, independently adjudicated cases and judgments based upon evidence, the country will have strengthened something far more valuable than any individual government. It will have strengthened institutions.
If cases instead become years of investigations, repeated remand hearings, sensational allegations and eventual silence, public confidence will suffer regardless of who was originally accused.
The measure of a justice system is not the importance of the people it can place in the dock. It is whether the same rules survive when the person standing there is powerful, powerless, popular or despised.
The Government investigates. Prosecutors prosecute. Defence lawyers defend. Judges decide. And until that final process establishes otherwise, an allegation remains an allegation.
It is an old principle. At moments such as this, it becomes a particularly important one.
Be that as it may.
