What is wrong with the Judiciary?
The jailing of Ranjan Ramanayake for contempt turns public sympathy against the courts. Victor Ivan asks what has gone wrong inside the Judiciary and answers with a series of cases from his own reporting.
The role of journalism
Asked why he proposed closing Ravaya, Victor Ivan answers with an account of what the paper was for — the battle against Sarath Nanda Silva, the criminal defamation law, and the case he took to the United Nations.
Decline of the Judiciary
Sri Lanka could have been saved by its courts. Victor Ivan sets the Indian Supreme Court’s record beside the Sri Lankan bench and finds a judiciary as backward as the legislature it was meant to check.
Nudity exposed
The Ramanayake tapes let Victor Ivan return to a case he pursued for years — a magistrate, an attorney general and a chief justice — and to what he says the episode did to the Sri Lankan judiciary.
Investigating corruption of the Yahapalana Government
The Yahapalana government’s flagship anti-corruption inquiry was chaired, Victor Ivan notes, by a former Chief Justice whose own record he sets out at length. A column about who is trusted to investigate whom.
ලලිත්-ප්රේමදාස ඝාතන
Replying to President’s Counsel Hemantha Warnakulasuriya, who told Mawbima and Ceylon Today that Ivan had hated Premadasa and set out to show that Premadasa, not the LTTE, killed Lalith Athulathmudali, Ivan recalls that Warnakulasuriya had defended Magistrate Lenin Ratnayake, whose rape case Ravaya exposed in August 1997. He restates his view of the 1993 killing of Lalith Athulathmudali, including a government news report three days earlier naming him as a suicide-bomber target, and his last conversation with Athulathmudali the night before.
සරත් සිල්වාගේ පුහු තර්ක
Former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva used interviews in Mawbima and Ceylon Today to recast himself and to claim that Ivan’s campaign against him grew out of a grudge from the 1971 insurrection trial. Ivan answers point by point: Silva was the most junior of five prosecutors, and Ivan’s lawyer in later cases was the lead prosecutor; the fight began when Silva, as Attorney General, shielded Magistrate Lenin Ratnayake. He recounts his challenge to the Attorney General’s criminal defamation indictments, rejected by Justice Mark Fernando but upheld by the UN Human Rights Committee, and the pending Supreme Court inquiry when Silva was made Chief Justice.
ජනමාධ්ය හැසිරීම ගැන
A friend who has read Ivan’s book on the Lenin Ratnayake affair many times asked him why no newspaper reported the day a remand prisoner struck Magistrate Lenin Ratnayake with a bag of excrement in the Nikaweratiya court, after the magistrate had abused the prisoner’s wife. Local reporters, Ivan concludes, stayed silent to please the magistrate. He then recounts how a former court officer turned television court reporter brokered favourable judgments for his channel’s owner in exchange for coverage that propped up Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva. Sri Lanka’s media culture, he argues, is as corrupt as its political culture.
අධිකරණය හා නීතිඥයන්
When the Bar Association installed Upul Jayasuriya as president with the ousted Shirani Bandaranayake in the chair rather than Chief Justice Mohan Peiris, it signalled that lawyers still did not accept the new Chief Justice. Ivan welcomes the gesture but argues that judicial independence died with the executive presidency, not the impeachment, and that bench and bar share the blame: the referendum judgment, the Eighteenth Amendment, the Lenin Ratnayake scandal and a rapist High Court judge’s reinstatement show a profession unable to discipline itself. He sets out the English model of regulation.
සටන් කිරීම හා අවසාන සටන
Challenged by a friend who says he has turned from a fighter into a preacher, Ivan explains that his aim now is not a change of government but a change of the political system, which needs the support even of those tied to the evil. Prompted by Ravaya’s 25th anniversary, he lists the eight real battles of his career — against the parliamentary privileges law, the 17-year UNP government, criminal defamation, for the assets law, against two court decisions, an outside Elections Commissioner, a retiring President’s taking of state property, and the limits of book publishing — and says he lost only one, blaming K.N. Choksy’s concession in court. His ten-year struggle with Sarath N. Silva ended without result, he argues, because the Bar, media owners, parties and senior judges such as Mark Fernando stayed silent; Silva never used contempt law against him, which Ivan attributes to the remnant of conscience he appealed to.