The path the professionals should choose
The last column of the run. Victor Ivan turns from politicians to professionals — lawyers, engineers, accountants, auditors — and argues that no one should be trusted to fix the country who has not first fixed their own field.
Opening doors for reforms
With the President and Prime Minister apparently willing, Victor Ivan sets out the reform plan itself — numbered, sequenced, and to be finished with a referendum inside three years.
What is wrong with the Judiciary?
The jailing of Ranjan Ramanayake for contempt turns public sympathy against the courts. Victor Ivan asks what has gone wrong inside the Judiciary and answers with a series of cases from his own reporting.
Decline of the Judiciary
Sri Lanka could have been saved by its courts. Victor Ivan sets the Indian Supreme Court’s record beside the Sri Lankan bench and finds a judiciary as backward as the legislature it was meant to check.
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.
Barring Nagananda Kodituwakku from practicing law
The Supreme Court has barred a public-interest litigator and prospective presidential candidate from practising for three years. Victor Ivan weighs Nagananda Kodituwakku’s record — and the record of those he fought.
නීති විද්යාලයේ විදුහල්පති ගෙදර යැවීම
The new Chief Justice’s suspension of the Principal of the Law College, reportedly for ensuring his own son passed with distinction, lays bare the rot in the legal community and the examination system, Ivan argues. The principal might well reply that he did the same for the children of the powerful for years without complaint. Ivan recalls a deputy examinations commissioner jailed for fixing A-level results, a Supreme Court bench that ordered a judge’s daughter admitted to law school without the marks, the Attorney General’s Department as a preserve of elite families, and principals who justify admission bribes by the lifestyle their schools demand.
අධිකරණය හා නීතිඥයන්
When the Bar Association installed Upul Jayasuriya as president with the ousted Shirani Bandaranayake in the chair rather than Chief Justice Mohan Peiris, it signalled that lawyers still did not accept the new Chief Justice. Ivan welcomes the gesture but argues that judicial independence died with the executive presidency, not the impeachment, and that bench and bar share the blame: the referendum judgment, the Eighteenth Amendment, the Lenin Ratnayake scandal and a rapist High Court judge’s reinstatement show a profession unable to discipline itself. He sets out the English model of regulation.
ජේ.ආර්.ගෙන් ඉගෙන ගැනීම
Ivan argues that the government won the battle over the Chief Justice at a ruinous cost, leaving constitutional interpretation and the writ jurisdiction hollow. He faults the judges and lawyers for fighting like a political party, recalls the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his own challenge to Sarath N. Silva’s appointment, and draws a close parallel between Mahinda Rajapaksa’s removal of Shirani Bandaranayake and J.R. Jayewardene’s stripping of Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s civic rights, warning that Jayewardene’s drive for unchangeable power ended in Black July, two insurrections and his own humiliation.
සටන් කිරීම සහ අවසාන සටන
The third part recounts two interventions against lower-court decisions in the rape cases of two young girls, risking contempt of court. In the first (1993), after the Attorney General withdrew the case against a retired senior police officer, Ravaya ran a campaign aimed at the Attorney General himself, drawing reader protests, Professor Savitri Goonesekere and a public meeting until the case was re-filed; years later a false recantation, engineered through the convent where the girl lived, was exposed by the CID. In the second (1995), a magistrate who had freed a popular film actor fled the country, and the actor was convicted before being freed on appeal. Ivan draws the lesson that every fight for justice needs a philosophy, a strategy, determination and commitment, not just a protest.