සටන් කිරීම හා අවසාන සටන
Challenged by a friend who says he has turned from a fighter into a preacher, Ivan explains that his aim now is not a change of government but a change of the political system, which needs the support even of those tied to the evil. Prompted by Ravaya’s 25th anniversary, he lists the eight real battles of his career — against the parliamentary privileges law, the 17-year UNP government, criminal defamation, for the assets law, against two court decisions, an outside Elections Commissioner, a retiring President’s taking of state property, and the limits of book publishing — and says he lost only one, blaming K.N. Choksy’s concession in court. His ten-year struggle with Sarath N. Silva ended without result, he argues, because the Bar, media owners, parties and senior judges such as Mark Fernando stayed silent; Silva never used contempt law against him, which Ivan attributes to the remnant of conscience he appealed to.
අධිකරණයේ ස්වාධීනත්වය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Rajpal’s column reports that the resolution a group of lawyers put forward against the appointment of a parliamentary select committee to inquire into the wrongs of Sarath N. Silva’s time as chief justice has been approved by the bar association’s executive committee, and names the lawyers who drove it.
අධිකරණ ස්වාධීනත්වය ගැන හෙළන කිඹුල් කඳුළු
More than 150 lawyers have signed a resolution calling for a general meeting of the bar association against the appointment of a select committee to inquire into the wrongs done by the retired chief justice while he held office — and the first signature on it, according to the newspapers, is that of a candidate for the presidency of the association at the coming election.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ආරක්ෂක ලේකම්ගේ වන්දි නඩුව හා සන්ඩේ ලීඩර් පුවත්පත
The defence secretary has sued the Sunday Leader for a billion rupees over an article on the MiG purchase. Ivan accepts his right to sue — criminal defamation was repealed on the argument that civil damages would suffice — but argues that the paper’s right to be represented by counsel of its choice is part of a fair trial, and describes how its lawyers came to withdraw.
හිටපු අගවිනිසුරු විත්තිකරුවකු වීම
Revision applications against the retired chief justice’s judgments are beginning to queue at the Supreme Court, and Ivan expects the queue to lengthen — though the poor who were punished without even a charge sheet are not in it. He argues that since the Supreme Court is the last place an error can be corrected, it is the institution that most needs to be under continuous scrutiny.