Parliamentary Election and anarchy
Behind the carnival of a parliamentary election, Victor Ivan sees anarchy: soldiers doing police work, a constitution honoured informally, and a central bank robbed with no one held to account.
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.
ජේ.ආර්.ගෙන් ඉගෙන ගැනීම
Ivan argues that the government won the battle over the Chief Justice at a ruinous cost, leaving constitutional interpretation and the writ jurisdiction hollow. He faults the judges and lawyers for fighting like a political party, recalls the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his own challenge to Sarath N. Silva’s appointment, and draws a close parallel between Mahinda Rajapaksa’s removal of Shirani Bandaranayake and J.R. Jayewardene’s stripping of Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s civic rights, warning that Jayewardene’s drive for unchangeable power ended in Black July, two insurrections and his own humiliation.
ක්රමය කුණුවී තිබෙන තරම පෙන්නුම් කරන නඩුවක්
Ivan sets out a fundamental-rights petition by T.R. Ratnasiri, a deputy superintendent of Customs, who for ten years has fought at his own expense to pursue a Rs 619 million customs fraud case against Colombo Dockyard. He traces how the inquiry was halted under a 2003 tax amnesty, revived, then undermined by three judgments of Sarath N. Silva that curtailed Customs’ powers, and how the petition accuses Attorney General Mohan Peiris and Treasury Secretary P.B. Jayasundera of acting to have the appeal withdrawn over the Director General’s objections. The courts, he notes, have shown little interest in hearing it.