Whither Justice?
A retired army commander and a respected engineer petitioned the Supreme Court over judicial appointments made without constitutional council approval. Victor Ivan records what happened: a bench including the Chief Justice heard the petition and then directed the Attorney General to establish whether the petitioners had abused the judiciary by bringing it. The message, as he reads it, is that nothing the President does may be questioned, and that asking is itself an offence. Neither man belonged to the UNP or sought party advantage; they went to the last place open to a citizen with a grievance about governance. The Court’s first duty is to defend the constitution against an executive assuming powers it does not have, and by making the protection of the President its duty instead it has annulled the constitution without replacing it — leaving the country, Ivan writes, with no fundamental law at all. Similar cases from the Organization of Professional Associations and the People’s Movement for Good Governance have met the same immunity ruling. What strikes him most is who is fighting: citizens who know they will lose, while the UNP, the JVP and the Jathika Hela Urumaya say nothing and parliament will not even debate it. A judiciary that abandons its supervision of the executive, he concludes, brings the country closer to Prabhakaran’s Reich, where no authority may investigate Prabhakaran.
The cat is out of the bag
Two TAFREN advertisements, four days apart, expose what the 100-metre coastal building ban was for. The first, on 27 February, told the country that homes destroyed inside the zone could not be rebuilt and that the government would provide 500-square-foot replacements. The second, on 2 March, exempted buildings permitted before 26 December 2004 by the Tourist Board and other authorities — which may remain, may be repaired, and may be completed if construction had begun. Victor Ivan concludes the rule applies only to ordinary residents, and that its purpose is to clear the most valuable land in the country for the tourist industry. He notes that a Coastal Zone Management Plan already existed, drawn up by specialists, with a conservation zone varying from twenty metres to more than a hundred according to local conditions, and even anticipating a tsunami; the government consulted neither the Coast Conservation Department nor its experts, who are now unwilling to quarrel with those holding absolute power. Coastal residents and hoteliers had coexisted profitably, he argues, and turning the industry into an occupier will serve neither.
The tsunami can become a political tsunami
A month on from the tsunami, Victor Ivan warns that mishandling the recovery could produce a political tsunami destructive to the government and the opposition alike. He attacks the 100-metre coastal buffer imposed by TAFREN: damage reached 400 metres inland at Telwatta and in Galle town while some houses at the water’s edge stood untouched, so the rule bears no relation to where the danger actually lay. It also bites only on the unlucky — those whose houses survive may stay, those whose houses were destroyed may not rebuild — and leaves the displaced waiting in camps for a house in a location of the government’s choosing, or buying land themselves. Pacific nations facing the same hazard do not clear their coasts, relying on warning systems and tsunami-resistant construction instead. Ivan argues that resettlement without consent breaches both UN policy on the displaced and the constitutional protection of private property, and sets out an alternative: let landowners rebuild where they lived, give them the per-capita sum the government would have spent, extend credit to ruined businesses, and revive economic life quickly.