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A morning in a Sri Lankan Magistrates Court (2003)[i]
Walk round the lush green of the Galle Cricket Ground. Approach the thick, solid ramparts of the old Dutch fort, and go through an archway, with the British Royal Arms Hon y soit qui mal y pense on one side, and the crest of the Dutch East India Company on the other. Walk into the square of colonial buildings, not in the architectural style of the British Empire , but of the seventeenth century Dutch. Many have small open offices, with black and white painted wooden signs proclaiming the names and qualifications of attorneys at law. On the right, there is a large bhodi tree, with hanging, aerial roots. In its shade, beside a couple of three-wheeler motor bike tuk-tuk taxis and a tractor, is a huge throng of people looking towards the door of a white building with a corrugated asbestos roof. Go through that door, and you are in the Galle Magistrates Court.
It is a large bare room with strip lights and a concrete floor. There is no coat of arms, crest, flag or other symbol of authority. If it were not for the raised magistrate's bench and the dock, it could be a Victorian school room. The rear half of the court is taken up with twelve wooden benches, crammed with defendants on bail, relatives, sureties and members of the public. Men sit on one side, women on the other. No standing is allowed and the throng outside comprises those who are unable to get into the court room.
Despite temperatures in the 80s and 90s outside, there is no air conditioning. The shutters of the large barred but unglazed windows are open and ten fans, the size of propellers on small aeroplanes, silently rotate. A large calendar with the lettering Rathnasiri Saw Mills flaps in the breeze.
Soon after ten o'clock, M C B S Morais, the chief magistrate of Galle , enters court. Everyone rises and bows. He is perhaps in his forties, appointed some seven years ago. He wears a black open gown with a purple sash, but no wig - as he quipped before going into court, "what matters is what is in the head, not what is on it." In his own time he studies for a post-graduate law degree at an English University and enjoys reading Lord Denning. A police man describes him as "an honest judge" - a view with which several attorneys concur.
He hears some 150 cases a day, five days a week. Most are short remands and sentences, but he may conduct up to fifteen or twenty trials a day. Despite the absence of state legal aid, over 90% of defendants are legally represented. Some cases are concluded not long after arrest, but there are delays - one weighty excise case on which Chief Magistrate Morais will give judgment later in the day dates back to 1998. His sentencing powers under the Sri Lankan Penal Code are limited to eighteen months imprisonment and a fine of 1500 rupees (£10 sterling), although other statutes give him additional powers - for example when dealing with cases involving firearms or terrorism. Weightier cases are heard in the High Court across the square. (The Penal Code, which dates back to 1885 and abolished Roman-Dutch criminal law is a superb piece of clear, plain English drafting which shames most modern British criminal statutes. It is available at www.lawnet.lk)
The morning starts with remands and bail applications, which are heard very briskly. There is no written list. The clerk calls on each case, and if the defendants are not in court, their names are repeated by a police officer shouting out into the square. The clerk takes the case papers out of a wooden tray and hands them up to the magistrate. When custody cases are called on, defendants run from the prison area, where the hands of other defendants holding onto its bars are visible from the court room, to the dock made up of a three sided picket fence, with painted numbers 1 to 6. They are mainly men and wear a variety of clothing, from sarongs in blue check table cloth like material to T shirts, polo shirts and collared shirts. A policemen tells them to fasten their shirt buttons before entering the dock.
Some cases are presented by police officers who stand, unarmed, in a group on the left hand side of the court. They wear khaki military-style uniforms. The twenty or so attorneys, some instructed in different cases by both prosecution and defence, sit at a long U-shaped leather topped table in the middle of the court room. Despite the climate, the men wear dark suits, white shirts and dark ties. None is robed. The only female attorney looks far more elegant in a white patterned sari, high heels and what seems to be an English solicitor's gown. All hold flimsy briefs - a sheet or two of folded A4 paper. When cases are called on, they rise from the table and approach the bench to make their submissions. They employ a quiet undemonstrative style of advocacy, although a couple waive their hands and point in ways which might raise eyebrows in an English court. The proceedings are in Sinhalese, interspersed with the very occasional English phrase. "Your Honour, I represent." and "fourteen-day remand". Chief Magistrate Morais, who very clearly enjoys the respect of the advocates, listens intently, interrupting rarely. When he asks questions a dialogue develops with the advocates.
The outcomes are written by the magistrate on the case papers and then copied into a ledger by a court official. Most of the bail applications are unsuccessful, despite the presence of potential sureties, and the magistrate moves equally briskly onto sentences for those who have pleaded guilty. Mitigation for those charged with minor offences and who face a fine is extremely brief, sometimes lasting only seconds. Sentence is pronounced, and the defendants walk across to the barred custody area where, after having their names entered into a large ledger by a prison officer, and a cursory search by another prison officer who remains seated, they will wait until the fines are paid.
A few yards away, past the offices of Probation and Child Care Services, is an Additional Magistrates Court, where another magistrate is hearing a trial, listening intently, chin in palm, while a woman sitting on the bench next to him takes detailed notes. An attorney, standing near to the witness box, takes a witness through his evidence in chief. Exhibits are brought from a nearby room crammed with scores of bottles of illicit liquor and stolen bicycles and motor bikes.
Sixty-five years after independence, there are few obvious signs of the one and a half centuries of British Rule in Sri Lanka . Yes, motorists generally drive on the left. There are red post boxes. Tea plantations in the hill country have names like James Finlay's Newburgh Estate, or the Sutherland Plantation. There are impromptu cricket games almost everywhere. But otherwise, like any other Asian country, Sri Lanka has its own distinctive character and feel. Like its society, the magistrates courts dispense a Sri Lankan brand of justice, but the signs of the British legacy (in both senses of the word) are clearly apparent.