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.
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.
ජනාධිපතිවරණය හා නීතියේ පාලනය
The Elections Commissioner has said he may have to withdraw from running the election because his orders are not obeyed — the police ignore him, and state media ignore the Competent Authority. However much authority the constitution grants him, nothing in the country lets him exercise it. This is not new: under Chandrika Kumaratunga an attempt to arrest the Elections Commissioner was stopped only by Attorney General Kamalasabesan’s intervention, and it was Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva who advised her to make it. The 1981 Jaffna district council poll was the first time a ruling party seized election administration outright, and Commissioner Jayasekera resigned over it. Since 1982 no election has been free and fair. Powers mean nothing while the ruler declines to obey the law.
අවලස්සණ ජනාධිපතිවරණයක්
Three weeks before the January 2010 presidential election, Ivan argues the contest between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka has taken the shape of a fight between two bazaar thugs rather than between democratic forces. Both camps breach the law on cutouts and posters, and neither the police nor the Elections Commissioner will enforce it. He traces the collapse to Chandrika Kumaratunga’s appointment of Sarath Nanda Silva as Chief Justice over the senior Mark Fernando, while corruption complaints against Silva were still before the court. Silva, once the target of a joint UNP–JVP impeachment motion, is now the opposition campaign’s constitutional spokesman. Ivan concludes that defeating a man will not change a system, and no party has said what should replace the executive presidency.
අල්ලස හා දූෂණය
The challenge corruption poses to the country’s progress is larger and more tangled than terrorism was. Ivan traces the machinery from the old bribery department to the commission that replaced it in 1994, and then shows what it is up against by following a television station sealed by the defence ministry, a fundamental rights petition heard by the chief justice, and the chief justice’s own name on the resulting company’s board — entered in the register as a social worker.
අවුල් විසඳා ගැනීම
The pleasure of the victory is already evaporating, Ivan warns, and a second term will be harder than the first. On GSP+ he points out that the tangle was made by the courts rather than the government — the moment a chief justice traded the country’s future for his own protection — and that releasing two LTTE leaders on bail while Tissainayagam serves twenty years cannot be explained to anyone.
හිටපු අගවිනිසුරු ලක්ෂ 650ක අල්ලසක් ගත්තේද?
The Sunday Leader has reported that the retired chief justice obtained a television station worth 65 million rupees for an institution connected to him from a party to a case before him. Ivan follows the transaction through the licences neither side held, the equipment released from the port, and the pattern of electronic media praising the chief justice while their own cases were being heard in front of him.
තිස්සනායගම් නඩුවේ තීන්දුව ගැන
Twenty years’ rigorous imprisonment for J.S. Tissainayagam has drawn the world’s attention as his detention did. Ivan argues that judges must sentence in proportion to the gravity of the offence and within the law, lists earlier judgments where that was not done, and notes that most of the complaints against Sri Lanka in Geneva were aimed not at the government but at the former chief justice — and that the country, not he, is paying for them.
විනිසුරුවරුන්ගේ සදාචාරය
Anonymous broadsheets about the conduct of judges are circulating among lawyers in Hulftsdorp at fifty rupees a copy, and Ivan treats them as a symptom rather than a source. Quoting H.L. de Silva on judicial integrity — that a judge’s moral honesty matters more than his legal skill — he sets out his own complaint against a district judge, the two inquiries that followed, and the protections that make a wayward judge almost untouchable.