Dusting an archaic law and embarrassing the Govt.

Sri Lanka's 'peaceful protesters' seem blissfully unconcerned about events unfolding in the outside world; their target is to keep agitating at home. To arrest this trend the Government went and needlessly declared high- security zones ( HSZ) throughout the capital city and compounded the matter by imposing them under, of all laws, the outdated Official Secrets Act. The impulsive move originating from the beleaguered Public Security Ministry in conjunction with high officials of the MoD (Defence Ministry) was unfortunately signed into law through a Gazette by the President as Defence Minister.

It was a textbook case of insensitive officials looking with blinkers how they can stem the vexed issue of weekly demonstrations mainly by politically motivated left- wing student unions with the tacit encouragement of Western embassies. These officials are now peddling the excuse that there is a bigger plot to overthrow not just the Government, but to incapacitate the State by taking over key institutions like Parliament, the Supreme Court etc., and that the cost of teargas canisters used and deployment of riot squads, court time and swelling of remand prisons were all at state expense.

The Official Secrets Act is archaic and has the hallmarks of a 'police state' or a state at war. It is limited to preventing government officials who are in possession of ' state secrets' from passing such information to 'enemies of the state'. Often the Media is lumped as such an enemy whenever inconvenient truths come into the public domain. But this is 'old hat' now and a new culture has come about in unlocking hitherto classified public information through the ground-breaking Right to Information ( RTI) Act. The irony of it all is that it was President Ranil Wickremesinghe's Government that was instrumental in bringing about this new open-government culture in 2016. In any event, HSZs appear prima facie, ultravires the Official Secrets Act.

International human rights watchdogs have jumped on the bandwagon of concerned local parties that have red flags about what is clearly a faux-pas by the Government on the HSZ Gazette. The timing of it while the UNHRC sessions are in progress and the Government is under the pump for its human rights record, and curtailment of public dissent, could not have been worse.

Apart from the legality of it all, the HSZ Gazette is thoroughly impractical to implement. It is best for the President to issue to over-enthusiastic ministry officials and greenhorn ministers a separate Executive Order asking them to kindly consult the Attorney General and get some free legal advice on what laws to use for which purposes before embarrassing the Government further. The decision to revoke this extraordinary Gazette Extra-Ordinary is most welcome.