යූඑන්පී අර්බුදය
A great deal can be learned from the UNP’s leadership crisis, not only about that party but about the political culture of Sri Lanka. Removing a party leader is extremely difficult: there is no simple, clear method in the party constitution for the membership to use when they want one removed, and nothing about how a group carrying on an internal struggle should proceed — and that is true of every party in the country.
අධිකරණය ජනමාධ්ය හා සමාජ-දේශපාලන යථාර්ථය
Uvindu Kurukulasuriya, once a freelance writer for Ravaya, questioned Ivan’s present silence on the burning questions of the judiciary in an article for the Sunday Leader on the 17th. He opened with something that interests the public: that the president, minister Basil Rajapaksa and the prime minister attended a reception at the home of Saliya Hettige on his appointment to the Supreme Court.
හෙජින් විනාශයට වගකිවයුත්තේ කවුද?
The British commercial high court has ruled that the Petroleum Corporation must pay Standard Chartered the 162 million dollars due under the hedging agreement, with interest. The bank went to that court rather than to an arbitration panel, probably meaning the judgment to affect the other banks party to the agreement as well.
සදාචාර අර්බුදය ජයගැනීම හා ගාන්ධි
The article on the moral decay among professionals brought a response good enough to satisfy him: one man he knows telephoned to say it was good enough to have muddled his head, another praised the approach while blaming him for stopping the Gandhi series in the middle, and a Tamil lawyer married to a Sinhala woman had his own things to say.
නීති වෘත්තියේ සදාචාර පරිහානිය
Professionals are those who have completed the education and the other qualifications a particular calling requires. They are the backbone of any field, and they make up the most important stratum of a country’s middle class. This article is about what has become of one of those professions, and much of the evidence in it is Ivan’s own experience as a client.
නව අගවිනිසුරු හා මහජන අපේක්ෂා
Ivan wishes the newly appointed chief justice well — and records that he wished her predecessor well in the same way, expecting him to put right some part of the enormous damage Sarath N. Silva had done to the courts, and that it has to be said with regret that nothing of the kind happened.
බොරදියේ මාළු බෑම හා යුක්තිය මරා දැමීම
At a media ministry workshop for journalists a questioner raised something that interested the whole hall: why is Ivan silent now, when he used to fight? The article is his answer — that the people whose institutions are being attacked today are in part the people who did their back-door deals with the chief justice and killed justice when it mattered.
අවිධිමත්භාවයට මහජනයා වන්දි ගෙවීම
Among the bad features native to this political system, one of the most important is that there is no orderly way of weighing the good and the bad of a state transaction — sometimes worth hundreds of millions — before final approval is given to it. The article works through the hedging agreements, the purchase of electricity from the private sector, and how risk and return are shared between the private and the state sectors.
හිටපු අගවිනිසුරු සහ ජීඑස්පී ප්ලස් සහනය
The EU has suspended Sri Lanka’s GSP Plus concession, worth 78 million euros in 2008 against exports of 1.24 billion. Government, exporters and commentators alike have forgotten what caused it: two rulings by former Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva, the same man now lecturing the country on international law. Under the ICCPR, citizens could petition the UN Human Rights Committee where the highest court failed them, and most complaints heard concerned Silva’s own conduct — among them Tony Emmanuel Fernando, jailed a year for contempt on a false charge after suing over withheld case records, and assaulted in prison the day he was committed. Silva also barred a work-to-rule at the port, which the ILO found breached its convention, and then disparaged that convention in open court with an ILO representative present. Correcting those two wrongs would be enough to recover the concession.
ආපසු හැරී බැලීමක් සමග ඉදිරිය දැකීමක්
Ivan sets out his own positions and why they left him isolated. He held that the Tamil rebellion was inseparable from Tamil grievances and had to be settled by negotiation — until it became clear the LTTE would accept nothing short of a separate state or confederation, at which point he supported defeating it militarily. He backed the war publicly and predicted the LTTE’s defeat while most of Ravaya’s own writers argued it could not be won. On the killing and beating of journalists he told colleagues the blame could not be laid wholly on a government unable to move against its army commander mid-war, and was angrily rejected by Sunanda Deshapriya. He records that this was the third insurrection he supported suppressing, including the 1971 rising he took part in himself. At the presidential election his loyalty was to Rajapaksa, whose remaining task he defines as remaking the state and political system.