Pistol Whipping Justice In Sri Lanka And The Truth About ‘Helping Hambantota’

By Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena -October 21, 2012

Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena

There is little doubt that the casual dismantling of Sri Lanka’s democratic institutions, as much as a pack of cards is routinely shuffled by seasoned card players, calls for deeply reflective thinking rather than shotgun reactions.

Necessity for a collective cathartic process

Indulging in outbursts of fury against the administration and predicting regime change, as if the structure of authoritarian rule that has been so carefully built post war can be destroyed in the twinkling of an eye as it were, may be personally satisfying but this is only to fool ourselves. If change does indeed take place, this needs to be happen through a solid and soberly rationalized understanding of how Sri Lanka’s crisis of democracy has come about and to a large extent, accepting that the blame is also ours. The time has come for a great collective call by Sri Lankans across religious, ethnic and societal distinctions that it is indeed ‘mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’. Indeed, this country’s purported intelligentsia needs to take this call very much to heart. It is only through this collective cathartic process that the country can be brought back to the democratic path, even if this may happen only decades down the line as seems very much the case presently.

The similes are ironic if not entirely appropriate. In 1999, when former Chief Justice Sarath Silva was appointed as the head of the judiciary by his onetime personal friend Chandrika Kumaratunga, bypassing one of Sri Lanka’s steadfastly rights friendly judges, the late Justice Mark Fernando, many were beguiled into dismissing dire warning signals for Sri Lanka’s judicial institution. Within a disastrous decade, the authority of Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court had been irretrievably undermined by a spate of judgments determined on personal or political considerations and characterized by unrestrained judicial autocracy to the extent of sentencing a lay litigant to jail for contempt of court. This unfortunate individual had persisted in citing the former Chief Justice as a respondent in an application and also resorted to talking too loudly in open court when pursing his application. Books and files were thrown at senior lawyers by the former Chief Justice, contempt of court was frequently threatened. The absurdity of it all was that these purportedly eminent counsel took the abuse lying down.

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