Diyawanna battles

Friday 23rd April, 2021

Parliamentary sessions, at times, can be far more entertaining than cable TV programmes like Animal Fight Club. On Wednesday, our honourable MPs almost came to blows during a debate on the report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI), which probed the alleged instances of political victimisation under the previous government. The Opposition accused the government of having adopted an ad hoc method to open an escape route for the SLPP MPs and supporters with court cases against them.

The SJB argued, in Parliament on Wednesday, that all 90 cases mentioned in the PCoI report could not be considered instances of political victimisation as they had been filed by the person, who currently holds the post of Chief Justice, when he was the Attorney General. Its line of reasoning has left us puzzled. The SJB’s argument is apparently based on the assumption that the legality of actions taken by an Attorney General who goes on to become the Chief Justice cannot be challenged. But one may recall that in 2018 the Supreme Court rejected all arguments that the person, who is the current Chief Justice, put forth, in his capacity as the Attorney General, in defence of the then President Maithripala Sirisena, who sacked Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and formed a new government with Mahinda Rajapaksa as the Prime Minister, before dissolving Parliament, unable to muster a simple majority therein. The UNF government was reinstated, and, interestingly, the following year the Attorney General, whose defence of the presidential actions did not stand up to judicial scrutiny, became the Chief Justice. The rest is history.

That the SJB’s argument at issue is flawed cannot, however, be used to justify the government’s claim that all those against whom the aforesaid cases were filed during the yahapalana government have been politically victimised.

Political victimisation is part of Sri Lanka’s rotten political culture. Many people have been politically victimised under successive governments, and they need redress. The yahapalana government also manipulated the police and the Attorney General’s Department to compass its political ends while claiming to be on a mission to restore the rule of law and usher in good governance. But the fact remains that after every regime change, lawbreakers in the garb of government MPs pretend to be victims of political witch-hunts and some of them succeed in having their cases terminated. The Opposition is, therefore, right in having challenged some decisions of the PCoI on political victimisation although the arguments it has put forth to bolster its position are specious.

Meanwhile, among those affected by political victimisation are two former Heads of the Judiciary—Dr. Shirani Bandaranayke and Mohan Peiris. The impeachment that led to the ouster of Dr. Bandaranayake in 2013 was politically motivated. The then Rajapaksa government got rid of her because it considered her an impediment to its political project which it sought to have legitimised judicially. Two years later, the yahapalana government righted the wrong, but the method it employed for that purpose was wrong. Instead of having Parliament correct what it had done to her, it had President Sirisena reinstate her by ‘vapourising’ Chief Justice Peiris. The presidential decree that Dr. Bandaranayke’s removal was unlawful; the post of the Chief Justice had not fallen vacant and, therefore the appointment of Peiris as the head of the judiciary was null and void ab initio, made an already bad situation worse. The yahapalana government should have taken action against either Peiris or former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who appointed him the Chief Justice or both of them, if it had really believed in its claim that he (Peiris) had been functioning as the Chief Justice unlawfully; that was the only way it could have justified the defenestration of Peiris. There were reports that some yahapalana goons had threatened him to resign.

Justice Minister Ali Sabry recently declared in Parliament that the removal of Peiris as the Chief Justice had been illegal, and promised to take remedial action. This issue, too, should be debated in Parliament.