Judiciary and the crisis
How the spine of the judiciary was broken. Victor Ivan follows the line from the taming of Parliament through Neville Samarakoon to Sarath Silva, and asks what a court could still do in a crisis like this.
True status of the Judiciary
A court that approves the removal of the people’s own instruments of sovereignty. Victor Ivan sets the Indian Supreme Court beside the Sri Lankan bench and returns to the years he spent fighting Sarath Nanda Silva.
Anarchy and the Judiciary
The new government wants the corruption cases withdrawn and the courts will not oblige. Victor Ivan reads the resulting cold war as the one place in the state where something is still being defended.
පක්ෂපාතභාවයට කප්පම් ගෙවන අපක්ෂපාතභාවයට දඬුවම් දෙන ක්රමයක්
Prompted by a reader’s tip, Ivan sets out how former Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake obtained a prime plot in Nuwara Eliya on President Kumaratunga’s recommendation for Rs. 30,000 in 1995 and sold most of it five months later for over Rs. 5.2 million. Such favours, he argues, are the bribe the executive presidency pays for loyalty, continuing the plunder of estate land after 1977. Those who uphold the law are punished instead: Auditor General Wijesuriya forced out, Justices Wanasundera and Mark Fernando passed over, B.C. Perera driven from the Treasury, and Shirani Bandaranayake impeached.
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.
දෝෂාභියෝගයේ තවත් පැත්තක්
Ivan argues that the impeachment of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake exposes a constitution built to keep the judiciary subservient: a judge who displeases the executive can be removed by a simple majority, while a president is all but unremovable. He sets her case beside Neville Samarakoon’s dignified stand against J.R. Jayewardene, reads the 1,575-page select committee report and finds the key charge unproven, yet holds that her part in buying a Trillium Residencies flat left her with a moral lapse of her own.
අධිකරණ අර්බුදයේ ගමන් මග
The government set out to fight Shirani Bandaranayake alone, but now faces judges and lawyers united against it. Answering the claim that Parliament is supreme and beyond the courts, the piece argues that Parliament’s powers are limited by law and that even a humble employee may not be dismissed without due process. It recalls the 1984 Samarakoon inquiry, when S. Nadesan and the Civil Rights Movement protested and opposition members agreed that a lawful procedure was needed, and the Kumaratunga government’s 2000 draft constitution, whose Article 151 provided a proper procedure for removing judges, and warns that without such reform the country faces anarchy.
අහෝ පාර්ලිමේන්තුව
Ivan condemns the one-sided procedure by which Parliament’s select committee has pursued Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake. He recalls the 1984 inquiry into Chief Justice Neville Samarakoon, when S. Nadesan argued that Parliament had no lawful procedure for trying a judge, and India’s Judges (Inquiry) Act of 1968, and explains how Parliament gained and then voluntarily gave up judicial power over privilege, citing his own privilege case in 1992. He lists eight faults in the present inquiry, from charges without supporting evidence to no list of witnesses and undue haste, and predicts that the President’s unease will embolden those resisting.
නයාට ගසා පොල්ල වරද්දා ගැනීම
Ivan argues that the government’s impeachment of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake has backfired: it expected her to resign, but the weak charges, the backing she has won from lawyers and the public, and international scrutiny ahead of the March Human Rights Council session have put it on the defensive. He lists this as the fourth clash between executive and judiciary under the 1978 system, after Neville Samarakoon’s time and Mark Fernando’s under Kumaratunga, and warns of a constitutional crisis if Parliament ignores a Supreme Court order, while noting that the judiciary is not blameless for the decline it now suffers.
අර්බුදයේ තවත් වැදගත් පැතිකඩක්
Ivan argues that the courts, which should protect citizens from abuse of power, have also helped create the crisis. After Neville Samarakoon, Justice Mark Fernando tried to carry forward a creative tradition of fundamental-rights jurisprudence until the Kumaratunga era drove him out; Ivan recounts long conversations with him after his retirement about the 1978 constitution, which Fernando helped draft with Sarath Coorey and A.J. Wilson. Citing Sarath N. Silva’s near-confession over the Helping Hambantota case and Ranil Wickremesinghe on crossovers, he argues that the courts have distorted the law, and that the bureaucracy and the rich who control governments share the blame with politicians.