Constitutional reforms stagnating like garbage

It is a typical incongruity of these times that constitutional reforms promising protection of civil liberties are discussed in tight-lipped seriousness in Colombo even while the police seem unable to arrest the hate mongering leader of the Bodu Bala Sena, Galaboda Gnanasara despite two arrest warrants being issued by the courts.

Business establishments of the Muslim community are subjected to one arson attack after another in a carefully targeted strategy. Meanwhile the leadership of the unity alliance holds forth in stern pronouncements on hate speech, exhorting the police to do their job properly.

Hallucinatory wanderings of a preposterous nightmare

In that most peculiar of ironies, Sri Lankans are also promised more law to tackle the problem of unrestrained hate speech while the law already on the statute books is not being properly implemented, as would be evident to a wide-eyed child.

All these comprise the sum of hallucinatory wanderings of a preposterous nightmare. In what sense can complicated constitutional rights be presented for discussion with any measure of credibility when the miserable basics of a Rule of Law system are not evidenced in the first place? This question well reflects the predicament in which this country finds itself today.

There are more contrasts at play. Affording a right of legal counsel to a suspect upon being detained by the police appears to be anathema to some. They gasp and they stutter as if the vilest of suggestions was being made. One embarrassment upon another follows the drafting sequence of amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code, culminating most recently in the red-faced withdrawal of the latest Bill. This unacceptably vested police officers with the discretion to prevent or allow the right to legal counsel depending on if it would prejudice the investigation.

Silly and cursory ‘safeguards’ are not sufficient

profound danger can only be prevented by narrowly and tightly drawn offences. But what we have on the table as draft counter-terror legislation illustrates the very opposite of that caution.

Sri Lankans do not need to be taught the perils of superimposing emergency law on ordinary law. Our entire unhappy history bears testimony to that fact. Emergency law had de facto replaced the normal law of the land for decades, starting from the first southern insurrection in the seventies, leading through to a brutal ethnic war in the North and East and swallowing up also a second catastrophic wave of disappearances and killings in the South in the eighties. This column has repeatedly made the point that ordinary people of all ethnicities are the first victims of the abuse of emergency law. Its impact is not limited to one race or one community. That point remains true then as it does now.

Restoring the Rule of law at a mundane level