Degeneration of Parliament exposed
From the old house at Galle Face to the complex at Kotte: Victor Ivan argues that a Parliament whose members trade with the government they audit has forfeited its own legality.
Foundations of incivility
Why does a country tolerate constitutional violation after constitutional violation without protest? Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the intellectual poverty of the Left, the language question and the habit of judicial silence.
Nudity exposed
The Ramanayake tapes let Victor Ivan return to a case he pursued for years — a magistrate, an attorney general and a chief justice — and to what he says the episode did to the Sri Lankan judiciary.
The vicious cycle of revenge
Each government jails the last one’s ministers and is jailed in turn. Victor Ivan calls it a tribal inheritance — a cycle of revenge that has replaced accountability and now protects everyone from investigation.
Ignoring the main problem
The 19th Amendment stripped the president of executive power but left the office elected as if nothing had changed. Victor Ivan argues the country keeps patching its errors instead of correcting them.
The crisis and constitutional violations
Every branch of the state has broken the Constitution, Victor Ivan argues — and he traces the habit from the disenfranchisement of the plantation Tamils under Soulbury to the amendments that followed 1977.
Investigating corruption of the Yahapalana Government
The Yahapalana government’s flagship anti-corruption inquiry was chaired, Victor Ivan notes, by a former Chief Justice whose own record he sets out at length. A column about who is trusted to investigate whom.
චෞර රැජින පොත කරළියට ගැනීම
When Chandrika Kumaratunga returned to politics to back Maithripala Sirisena, the state-owned Lake House papers began serialising, without Ivan’s permission, his book Chaura Rajina (‘The Queen of Deceit’), written against her. Ivan compares the two presidents, arguing that Mahinda did more harm than Chandrika. He reveals that he refused Mahinda Rajapaksa’s expectation that he would help against Kumaratunga, and a direct request from the President, by telephone, for help in the case against Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake, and concludes that no social struggle is entirely pure.
ජනාධිපතිවරණයේ උරගා බැලීම්
Ivan names the institutions the January 2015 election will test. The judiciary has already bent, approving a third term. The state media have been turned into campaign tools, with attacks on Maithripala Sirisena’s rallies such as at Polonnaruwa. The Commissioner of Elections faces abuses such as in the Polpithigama division, while the Presidential Elections Act of 1981 clearly defines bribery. Finally he warns about any role for the security forces in the campaign.
ජනාධිපතිවරණයේ ගති ලක්ෂණ
Ivan examines how the President resolved the Eighteenth Amendment dispute by seeking the Supreme Court’s opinion on 5 November 2014, which he says shows a judiciary tamed since the impeachment of Shirani Bandaranayake, recalling J.R. Jayewardene’s treatment of the courts. He criticises the Commissioner of Elections’ passivity over the election’s timing and the Pope’s visit, and warns that the opposition’s disunity and factionalism could hand the government a third term and push the country towards anarchy.