Government Analyst says around 70 per cent of reports received by the department are drug-related, raising wider questions over delays across Sri Lanka’s criminal-justice system
COLOMBO – Around seven out of every ten reports received by the Government Analyst’s Department are now related to drugs, an extraordinary concentration of forensic work that provides another indication of the scale at which narcotics cases are moving through Sri Lanka’s criminal-justice system.
Acting Government Analyst Kamani Perera has said approximately 70 per cent of the reports received by the department concern drugs, with priority being given to cases involving suspects held in remand custody so that the relevant legal proceedings can be expedited.
The figure is striking not merely because of what it says about narcotics. It also raises an important question about what such an enormous workload means for everything else the Government Analyst’s Department is required to do.
Forensic analysis can play a crucial role in criminal proceedings. Courts, investigators, prosecutors and defendants may depend upon scientific reports before cases can advance, and delays can have consequences extending far beyond administrative inconvenience. Where an accused person remains in remand pending the completion of evidence, time itself becomes an important component of justice.
Prioritising cases involving remand prisoners is therefore understandable. But if drug-related submissions now account for roughly 70 per cent of the department’s workload, the Government should establish whether the available laboratory capacity, personnel and equipment have expanded sufficiently to deal with that demand.
The issue also connects directly with Sri Lanka’s wider campaign against narcotics. Increased police operations and arrests inevitably create downstream work for prosecutors, courts, prisons and forensic laboratories. An enforcement campaign can therefore only move as quickly as the slowest part of the criminal-justice chain.
Arresting more suspects without providing the institutions responsible for processing those cases with corresponding resources risks moving a bottleneck rather than eliminating it.
There is also a basic accountability question surrounding remand custody. The public should know how many people are presently awaiting Government Analyst reports, what the average turnaround time is for a narcotics report and how that compares with other categories of forensic examination.
Those figures would help distinguish between a department successfully managing an exceptional workload and a system struggling under the weight of the cases being sent to it.
Sri Lanka’s drug problem is usually measured in kilograms seized, suspects arrested and raids conducted. The Government Analyst’s figures provide another measure – the enormous institutional burden that begins after the television cameras have left the raid.
THE NEWSLINE QUESTIONIf drugs now consume around 70 per cent of the Government Analyst’s caseload, how long are suspects waiting for reports – and what is happening to all the other cases waiting in the laboratory queue?
Be that as it may, an arrest may make the evening news. Justice still has to make its way through the laboratory, the prosecution and the courtroom.
