Human rights Vs Election victory
The future of democracy in Sri Lanka appears to hang on one question: whether the Commissioner of Elections can hold the coming parliamentary election in a free and fair manner, if not entirely then substantially.
Banding together against polls violence
Administration by representatives the people elect is an inherent feature of a democratic system. If the elections are not free and fair, the administration they produce cannot be called democratic — which is why a campaign to get a million people to band together against election violence matters.
Parliament after polls: cohabitation or conflict?
What will the new parliament look like? Will the PA improve its slender majority or find itself on the opposition benches? A seat-by-seat reading written a fortnight before the October 2000 general election.
When the going gets tough, PA gets going
The government’s greatest hope was to change the electoral system somehow, introduce a new one, and win the coming parliamentary election on it. That hope has gone, and the path left is a difficult one: lose the majority and the presidential system itself goes into crisis.
Judging the independence of the Judiciary
An independent judiciary is a precondition for the survival of a democracy. Sovereign power lies with the people, and it is the courts’ responsibility not to permit laws that reduce it. The test applied here is how the bench was constituted to examine the Seventeenth Amendment.
What happened to the Wayamba Election?
All the Wayamba election petitions were dismissed at the stage of preliminary objections, on the ground that they had not specified how the corruption, the intimidation and the prevention of voting had affected the result. What the petitions actually contained, station by station, is set out here.
Election under a commission
The ban on meetings and demonstrations has been lifted, and so has the censorship of foreign news — but publishing in the local media what the foreign media print about the war is still forbidden. The world outside has been given the right to know the truth about the war in the north.
External powers and internal undemocratic activities
It is welcome that the external powers interested in a solution are looking past Prabhakaran’s extremism to the anti-democratic conduct of the Chandrika government. The American Deputy Secretary of State has gone beyond refusing to recognise an Eelam state to saying his government wants free and fair elections and protected freedom of expression.
Tactics to ensure parliamentary power
The PA government is locked in a dilemma there is no easy way out of. Even a very satisfactory result at the coming parliamentary election would leave it with fewer seats than it holds now, which is why the electoral system itself is what it wants to change.
Political solutions or political opportunism
Making a constitution implies that the people of a country reach a consensus on the kind of government that suits them. In Sri Lanka it is being done behind their backs: they do not know what is proposed, and the document looks likely to reach them for discussion only after every agreement has been struck.