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.
A Country Destroyed by Leaders
Victor Ivan argues that Sri Lanka has become, or is fast becoming, a failed state — a term its academics resist because they fear UN administration, while making no serious intervention to correct the country’s course. His test is the constitution: legislature, executive and judiciary alike decline to respect it, and none treats honouring it as a condition of the system’s survival. The 17th Amendment provides his illustration. A presidential campaign is underway with no elections commission in place, the President having refused to approve a name the constitutional council investigated and cleared. The elections commissioner, past retirement age and unable to leave his post because no commission exists, went to court and was told there was nothing the judiciary could do; parliament did not debate the matter at all. The constitutional council itself has been dormant for months, leaving Court of Appeal vacancies unfilled, with the IGP retiring in November and the terms of the Police and Public Service Commissions expiring. Appointing new members falls to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition — the two men now contesting the presidency, neither of whom appears interested.
The Mahinda – Anura Equation
The President has named Mahinda Rajapaksa her party’s presidential candidate and her own brother its prime ministerial candidate, though only the first nomination was asked for — and done while an amendment making her SLFP leader for life was being introduced. Victor Ivan reads it as a chess move of some cunning: in every sequence of elections, a defeated Mahinda loses even the seat he holds while Anura Bandaranaike emerges as leader of the opposition, and family control of the party survives the defeat. Behind it sits the unresolved question of whether the presidential election falls in 2005 or 2006, and a chain of unanswerable questions about what the Elections Commissioner will decide, whether the President will seek a Supreme Court interpretation first, and what either will do if they disagree. Ivan then turns to the parties themselves, arguing neither main party is democratic — the SLFP run by one family, the UNP by several — and traces the pattern of leaders seeking to escape their term limits: Jayewardene collecting undated resignation letters from a five-sixths majority and dreaming of a third term until Premadasa stood against him, Kumaratunga collecting the same letters from twenty-three deputy ministers in 2000 with the judiciary’s support. Her dreams end, he concludes, only if Mahinda can become a Premadasa.
The Joint Mechanism and the Coming Political Crisis
Having promised the Kandy aid conference she would sign the joint mechanism for tsunami relief in the north-east regardless of extremist pressure, the President has been called. The JVP, under internal pressure that has made the issue one of survival and dignity, has resolved to quit the government if she signs. Victor Ivan sets out the arithmetic: the JVP’s departure costs 39 seats, the Hela Urumaya’s likely departure another nine, and the Tamil Alliance’s 22 do not cover the gap. Refusing to sign preserves the government but damages her standing internationally, in her party and among the people. Her alternatives are a coalition with a UNP leader who will not strengthen her hand, inducing a large group of UNP MPs to defect — for whom, Ivan notes, she could probably secure judicial protection through the Chief Justice — or dissolving parliament, possibly resigning the presidency and contesting as prime ministerial candidate herself. He judges a parliamentary election would hurt the JVP and Hela Urumaya most, and warns that whichever course she takes the turmoil will not end soon, still less if the LTTE abandons the ceasefire.
How will the struggle for power end?
In this article, Victor Ivan analyzes the escalating power struggle between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. Facing the end of her term and unable to contest the next presidential election, the President seeks to overhaul the executive presidency to secure her continued political dominance, potentially by aligning with the JVP or utilizing Parliament as a constituent assembly. Conversely, the Prime Minister is determined to preserve the current system to claim the executive presidency for himself, plotting to render the President politically irrelevant. Ivan warns that this clash of ambitions, coupled with a lack of faith in the impartiality of the judiciary under Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva, risks plunging the nation into an extra-constitutional crisis and potential civil conflict.
Conscience Benumbed
In this article, Victor Ivan argues that decades of mass violence and rampant political corruption have paralyzed the collective conscience of Sri Lankan society. Drawing heavily on the psychological trauma outlined in Prof. Daya Somasunderam’s book Scarred Minds, Ivan asserts that the psychological damage seen in the Tamil community is reflective of a wider distortion affecting all Sri Lankans—victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike. Using the commercialization and resulting decline of Sri Lankan cricket as an analogy for the state of the nation, the author critiques how governance has become a mechanism for public plunder. Specifically, Ivan highlights the failure of the 17th Amendment, pointing out that constitutional safeguards and independent commissions (such as the Elections, Police, and Bribery Commissions) have been deliberately sabotaged or stalled by the President, with little to no resistance from the judiciary, the political opposition, or a benumbed public.
Rule of Law and the Judiciary
One of the three pillars of the modern democratic political system is the judiciary. When the legislature consisting of representatives elected by the people enacts policies, the instrument that implements those policies is the executive.