“I Know the Law”: Why Is Sri Lanka’s Attorney General Fighting a Scientific Battle in Court?
In the fevered years of the pandemic, governments across the world made mistakes. Some erred on the side of caution. Others drifted into panic. But few democratic nations transformed public health policy into a battlefield where lawyers appeared to outrank scientists. Sri Lanka, unfortunately, became one of those rare exceptions.
At the centre of this controversy now stands J.A. Parindra Ranasinghe, the country’s Attorney General, whose department is accused by critics of spending vast sums of public money pursuing legal pressure against social activist Chirantha Amarasinghe over statements related to COVID-19 burials and transmission theories.
The question now echoing through legal and civil society circles is brutally simple: since when did the Attorney General’s Department become a scientific research institution?
During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, Sri Lanka enforced one of the world’s most controversial compulsory cremation policies. Muslim and Christian communities objected strongly, arguing that burial rights were being denied without credible scientific justification. International organizations, human rights groups, and religious leaders repeatedly questioned the government’s position.
The core argument advanced by authorities at the time was that the coronavirus could potentially spread through groundwater contamination from buried bodies. Critics immediately challenged that claim, asking for peer-reviewed scientific evidence demonstrating such transmission.
Yet despite the enormous social and religious implications of the policy, the government struggled to produce universally accepted scientific proof.
That is where the dispute involving Chirantha Amrasinghe allegedly took shape. According to critics of the investigation, the activist merely echoed what many international scientists and global health bodies had already indicated: that COVID-19 was not proven to spread through properly managed burials and groundwater systems.
If so, then why was the Criminal Investigation Department reportedly mobilized? Why were investigative resources deployed? And more importantly, why are taxpayers footing the bill for prolonged legal hostility over what was fundamentally a scientific and public health debate?
One senior Colombo lawyer privately remarked that the affair risks creating “a dangerous precedent where dissent against questionable state science becomes criminalized.”
The deeper constitutional issue is not whether governments can impose emergency health measures. Of course they can. Every state possesses emergency powers during pandemics. The issue is whether those powers were exercised proportionately, transparently, and based on independently verifiable science.
Because if the Attorney General’s Department insists that burial practices created a scientifically demonstrable risk, then the public has every right to ask:
Where is the evidence?
Was there a peer-reviewed Sri Lankan study?
Which epidemiologists signed off on it?
Which virologists established groundwater transmission?
Which international journals validated the theory?
And crucially, if such groundbreaking scientific evidence truly existed, why did Sri Lanka stand almost alone internationally in enforcing mandatory cremations?
Critics say the government’s legal aggression created unnecessary trauma among minority communities already facing fear and uncertainty during the pandemic. Families were denied traditional funeral rites. Religious leaders pleaded for flexibility. Human rights advocates warned the policy was discriminatory.
Yet instead of calming tensions through transparent scientific debate, the state appeared to harden its position.
Now, years later, the irony has become impossible to ignore. A legal institution tasked with upholding justice is being accused of defending a disputed scientific narrative with prosecutorial intensity.
There is also a moral dimension that cannot simply be buried under procedural language.
Millions of rupees in taxpayer money are allegedly being spent on investigations, legal consultations, state counsel hours, and administrative machinery connected to disputes surrounding statements on COVID burial policies. Sri Lanka is a country battling debt, inflation, institutional distrust, and overstretched public services. Citizens therefore have every democratic right to question whether this is an appropriate use of public funds.
A retired academic from Colombo University reportedly observed that “science evolves through evidence, challenge, and peer review—not through CID interrogations.”
That statement cuts to the heart of the matter.
Science is not determined by prosecutorial authority. A courtroom is not a laboratory. Legal intimidation cannot substitute empirical proof.
If the Attorney General’s Department possesses conclusive scientific evidence supporting its earlier burial policies, then transparency would end the controversy overnight. Publish the studies. Release the expert findings. Allow international scrutiny. Let science speak for itself.
But if no such definitive evidence exists, then Sri Lanka faces a deeply uncomfortable question: was state power used to suppress legitimate criticism during a moment of national fear?
The tragedy is that this debate could have been handled differently from the beginning. Governments gain credibility when they tolerate scrutiny, especially during crises. Democracies become stronger when scientific disagreement is answered with evidence rather than investigations.
The pandemic exposed many weaknesses across the world—political panic, institutional arrogance, and the temptation to convert uncertainty into authority. Sri Lanka was not alone in that failure. But the continued pursuit of activists over contested scientific claims risks prolonging the damage long after the virus itself faded from daily life.
And perhaps that is the most troubling image of all: Stupid Government lawyers attempting to prosecute biology, while citizens are still waiting for the science.