Ghosts ahoy!

Friday 23rd May, 2021

It is said that victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan. This must have come to mind when one watched Wednesday’s low-key ceremony to mark the 12th anniversary of the defeat of terrorism. Everyone wants to share the credit for the country’s war victory, but nobody claims responsibility for the Easter Sunday tragedy, which could have been prevented.

The aforesaid saying also applies to draft bills presented to the Parliament of Sri Lanka. When bills are challenged in the Supreme Court and found to be replete with sections inconsistent with the Constitution, nobody takes responsibility for drafting them. The Port City Economic Commission Bill (PCECB), which was passed with amendments yesterday, is a case in point. (It looks as if the public had to take out a paternity suit!) The Opposition has demanded to know who drafted the bill, but the government remains tight-lipped. Are we to conclude that there was no human involvement in the formulation of the bill? Ghosts ahoy!

Luckily, the Supreme Court was moved against the PCECB, which would otherwise have become law with all its sections inconsistent with the Constitution. Those who took the trouble of taking it to the apex court, albeit for political reasons, deserve praise for having caused it to be rid of harmful sections to a considerable extent. No sooner had the Supreme Court decided to take up petitions against the PCECB bill for hearing than the government undertook to introduce amendments to the PCECB suo motu. It became obvious that the government had inserted those sections into the bill, knowing that they were not consistent of the Constitution. The same is true of the 20th Amendment draft bill, which had sections which, the Supreme Court said, required a special majority in parliament as well as people’s approval at a referendum.

Any draft bill can contain sections that are inconsistent with the supreme law of the country and therefore need to be amended, but a government that intentionally presents bills teeming with such provisions in the hope of having them ratified deserves condemnation.

That said, it needs to be added that the Opposition members who fiercely opposed the PCECB, and went so far as to torch some copies thereof in public also have a history of passing laws in the most despicable manner and even violating people’s franchise in the process. In 2017, unable to face an electoral contest, they smuggled a slew of sections into the Provincial Council Elections (Amendment) bill at the committee stage, having presented it to Parliament on the pretext of increasing female representation in the Provincial Councils. What Parliament ratified finally was a Christmas tree bill with many committee-stage amendments tailor-made to meet the needs of that regime, which avoided elections like the plague. The UNP, the SLFP, the TNA, the SLMC, the JVP, etc., joined forces to rush that rotten bill through Parliament.

Similarly, the 13th Amendment, which was passed with a special majority in Parliament should have been approved by the people at a referendum, according to constitutional experts, as it paved the way for the devolution of power. It is also being argued in legal circles that the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th Amendments to the Constitution should also have been placed before the people at referenda.

Judicial sanction and parliamentary majorities do not necessarily make laws acceptable to the public. All controversial cases pertaining to such laws are heard before the people’s court, whose verdicts matter at elections. The yahapalana leaders responsible for the bond scams got away with their sins legally by throwing former Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran and several others to the wolves. They were not even prosecuted, but all of them were severely punished at the last general election, where they failed to secure their seats. People are likely to mete out the same treatment to those who masterminded the mega sugar tax scam and got away with it.

Government politicians are cock-a-hoop at having secured the passage of the PCECB; they seem to think their problems are over, but the new law will be reviewed by the people’s court in time to come and its verdict will be delivered at a future election.