Tuesday 30 of August 2011By JC Weliamuna (Eisenhower Fellow, Senior Ashoka Fellow & Constitutional Lawyer)
(Lanka-e-News -29.Aug.2011, 11.45P.M.) In legal and political literature, the term ‘dictatorship’ includes authoritarianism and is synonymous with traditional terms such as absolutism, absolute governments, despotism and tyranny. In political and constitutional legal theory, a dictatorship is a political regime under which the power of government is not limited by any law. Perhaps the main feature in all types of dictatorships is that there is a concentration of political power in one power center and generally in one person occupying a single high government, party, religious office or it may be located in a small and cohesive elite group. The world has now seen such concentration of dictatorial power be in the hands of a single leader, a popular majority or in its democratically elected executive or legislature. The common feature of all these systems, whether it is a rule of one person or a group of persons, is that it dominates the government while dictating to the entire society its rules without any checks and balances. Full story » ======================================================== Why Sri Lanka matters
New World Edward Mortimer“More than 300,000 people became the victims of the reckless disregard for international norms by the warring parties. Indeed, the conduct of the war by them represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law designed to protect individual dignity.” In April 2011, a panel of experts convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon published this damning indictment of the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).The report, which focussed on events leading up to the end of the country’s long-running civil war in May 2009, accused both parties of committing human rights violations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. It called for an international investigation, noting that as many as 40,000 civilians could have been killed in the final weeks of fighting, and that the majority of them died at the hands of the Sri Lankan army. Full Story»> 