අධිකරණය ජනමාධ්ය හා සමාජ-දේශපාලන යථාර්ථය
Uvindu Kurukulasuriya, once a freelance writer for Ravaya, questioned Ivan’s present silence on the burning questions of the judiciary in an article for the Sunday Leader on the 17th. He opened with something that interests the public: that the president, minister Basil Rajapaksa and the prime minister attended a reception at the home of Saliya Hettige on his appointment to the Supreme Court.
හෙජින් විනාශයට වගකිවයුත්තේ කවුද?
The British commercial high court has ruled that the Petroleum Corporation must pay Standard Chartered the 162 million dollars due under the hedging agreement, with interest. The bank went to that court rather than to an arbitration panel, probably meaning the judgment to affect the other banks party to the agreement as well.
සදාචාර අර්බුදය ජයගැනීම හා ගාන්ධි
The article on the moral decay among professionals brought a response good enough to satisfy him: one man he knows telephoned to say it was good enough to have muddled his head, another praised the approach while blaming him for stopping the Gandhi series in the middle, and a Tamil lawyer married to a Sinhala woman had his own things to say.
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.
නීති වෘත්තියේ සදාචාර පරිහානිය
Professionals are those who have completed the education and the other qualifications a particular calling requires. They are the backbone of any field, and they make up the most important stratum of a country’s middle class. This article is about what has become of one of those professions, and much of the evidence in it is Ivan’s own experience as a client.
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.
මහත්මා ගාන්ධි ඝාතනයේ 63 වැනි සංවත්සරය වෙනුවෙනි. ගාන්ධි ශ්රී ලාංකික අපට අදාළවන්නේ කෙසේද?
Gandhi can be called the greatest theorist the world has produced on popular struggle for social justice, and its greatest fighter. Before he introduced his non-violent tradition the world had only a method of fighting evil with evil; he gave it a way of defeating evil without becoming evil, and proved it worked by testing it in an enormous and complicated society.
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.
යහපත් අනාගතයක් සඳහා
Sri Lanka should not go on manufacturing new conflicts once an old one ends. Fonseka’s arrest looked at first glance like the winner punishing the loser, but the President’s account is that the army authorities wanted to court-martial Fonseka over matters arising from his time as Chief of Defence Staff, and that he instructed them to wait until after the election so it would not appear he was blocking his opponent from standing. If the process cannot be reversed it should at least be transparent, and a conviction could be met with a pardon in view of Fonseka’s war service. With the war over, the President’s duty is to soften his administration: let the opposition campaign unhindered, invite back journalists who fled, investigate the one who disappeared during the campaign, and legislate on torture and children’s rights — which would also restore GSP Plus.
ජෙනරාල් අත්අඩංගුවට ගැනීම
The timing and manner of Fonseka’s arrest were both wrong. He took 40 votes in every hundred cast against the winner’s 57 — 4,173,185 against 6,015,934 — which makes him, whatever his background, the country’s second accepted leader. Arresting the loser at the close of a presidential election looks like reprisal, and looks worse still while he is challenging the result in court: a move to block the election petition. Military law should apply to serving soldiers, and Fonseka has retired; offences discovered after retirement, if criminal, belong in the ordinary courts. The government has stained its own victory and made a new hero of the man the voters rejected, and his wife Anoma will become a political figure carrying the grievance from platform to platform. The president stopped two earlier attempts at this arrest and was abroad for the third; correcting it is his responsibility, and a test of his character. The example to follow is Dutugemunu’s treatment of the defeated Elara.