Sunday Punch 2
tions and drowned them in the process. That, like the Volkswagen which packs its engine in the boot, so would he have to shove his promise to be only a one term president in the dickey.
Beside his party was clamouring for him to re- contest. As S. B. Dissanayake stated this week, “the party has made a decision and the president cannot say no”. Perhaps, in his final term, if he is reelected in 2020, he can keep the pledge he made before Ven Sobitha’s coffined corpse and drive the final stake into the very heart of the vampire executive presidency and lay it finally to rest without any chance of resurrection even as a mutilated phantom.
The second was a line of attack. It came with Sarath Amunugama unveiling the President’s secret weapon of mass destruction, the first draft of the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) bill, which can be a weapon of deterrence or a weapon of annihilation. It was the plan to take a short cut, go off the beaten track from the long and laborious judicial process and bring to book those guilty of corruption and abuse of power. It would allow him to fell two birds with one stroke of his inked quill. With only three years left to keep his promise to the people to crackdown on corruption he will be able to finally show results. And simultaneously exile those belligerent but masked in guilt from the political landscape and leave the field clear, come 2020.
But the short route of expediency also has its pitfalls.
In the first instance the proposed CJC bill will have retrospective effect which though permitted by the constitution is often frowned on by jurists as one that goes against the grain of justice. In the second instance, it raises selective law enforcement to a higher level and enables the president to be the sole arbitrator to determine in his opinion as to when and on whom the axe should fall. It empowers him with the right to appoint all the members to the criminal justice commission.
The only silver lining is that the commission must comprise of sitting or retired judges of the Supreme Court or Appeal Court which at least will give it a semblance of judicial authority and independence but the provision to also include in the commission, an attorney-at-law with over 30 years of practice tends to dull the cloud’s edge. Those in black coats and black ties whatever their pedigree can be accused of partisanship where at least those purple cloaked and ermine wigged are presumed to be more independent and unprejudiced in their judgments.
In a nutshell what this draft of the proposed Criminal Justice Commission Bill envisages is: to empower a committee comprised of the president’s men and women to inquire into offences the president in his opinion considers to have been committed at a time before or after the commencement of the Act concerning corruption in general but of such a nature which, the President holds to be in his opinion, is of national importance or endangers national security or national interest; when the president in his opinion holds that the practice and procedure of the ordinary courts are inadequate to administer justice for the purpose of securing the trial and punishment of the persons who committed such offences: and then for that committee to act freely, without the fetter of sticking to the rules of procedure and evidence ordinarily applicable to a court of law, but guided only by the principles of natural justice,