Puzzles of Sri Lanka
The citizenship case is dismissed and the celebrations begin. Victor Ivan sets the moment against the longer puzzle of a country that has never managed to build a nation out of its own people.
Disabled electoral system and Gotabaya’s candidacy
With Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s candidacy contested in court over his citizenship, Victor Ivan turns to the machinery of the election itself — an Election Commission without the power to enforce its own rules.
Referring the matter to the Supreme Court
The full text of the public appeal to the Supreme Court on MPs who transact business with the state, signed by Victor Ivan and some sixty writers, academics, journalists, lawyers and trade unionists.
Fox and the poultry pen
The state owns the land, the sea, the rivers and the air — and its custodians have been helping themselves. Victor Ivan traces the licences, the leases and the presidential foundations, and asks the Supreme Court to act.
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.
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.
අඬමුද? සිනාසෙමුද?
This article critically examines the controversial tenure and actions of former Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva, detailing his abuse of judicial power for personal and political gain. It outlines his role in imprisoning S.B. Dissanayake to appease President Chandrika Kumaratunga, his subsequent legal betrayal of Kumaratunga following a personal insult regarding his behavior toward women, and his intimidation of treasury officials to secure an abnormally high pension. The author also provides a detailed investigative account of a 2004 incident near Diyawanna Oya, where police allegedly found the Chief Justice half-naked in a parked vehicle with a woman, using the cover-up of this event to highlight the systemic corruption and apathy within Sri Lanka’s political, parliamentary, and judicial systems.
සරත් සිල්වා ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Ceylon Today did not print his reply uncut as promised, Ivan says, and the media that now present Sarath N. Silva as a saviour include owners who won judgments from him when he needed their support. Silva, once slated as the common opposition candidate, still poses as a reformer. Ivan contrasts Justice Mark Fernando’s rulings, which forced the only free and fair election since 1977, with Silva’s court, which turned away election petitioners. Four of six UN Human Rights Committee findings against Sri Lanka concern Silva’s judgments, among them S.B. Dissanayake’s and Tony Fernando’s, jailed for contempt after petitioning a bench Silva himself led.
සරත් සිල්වාගේ පුහු තර්ක
Former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva used interviews in Mawbima and Ceylon Today to recast himself and to claim that Ivan’s campaign against him grew out of a grudge from the 1971 insurrection trial. Ivan answers point by point: Silva was the most junior of five prosecutors, and Ivan’s lawyer in later cases was the lead prosecutor; the fight began when Silva, as Attorney General, shielded Magistrate Lenin Ratnayake. He recounts his challenge to the Attorney General’s criminal defamation indictments, rejected by Justice Mark Fernando but upheld by the UN Human Rights Committee, and the pending Supreme Court inquiry when Silva was made Chief Justice.
නීතියක් නැති රටකට!
With the impeachment of the Chief Justice reaching its climax, the paper sets aside ordinary reporting to list, in twelve numbered points, the consequences of pressing ahead in defiance of rulings by the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal. It rejects the government’s comparisons with the Philippines and Westminster, warns that a new Chief Justice installed over a lawfully protected one would bring repression and chaos into the courts, and predicts damage as grave as the 1982 referendum and Black July.