The need for a genuine change in governance

By Kishali Pinto Jayawardene

Does one need to possess foreign citizenship to practice basic rights of life, liberty and free expression in Sri Lanka? The meaning of national sovereignty This question has become particularly relevant given steeply increased abductions and disappearances in recent months. If Frontline Socialist Party's Premakumaran Gunaratnam (aka Noel Mudalige) had not claimed Australian citizenship, what would have been his fate or for that matter, of his co-abductee Dimuthu Attygalle? We do not need to search far for this answer. The still unknown whereabouts of other disappeared individuals, including a detainee who was abducted from the court premises itself, stares at us in response. This column has said more than once; the Government cannot simply shrug off these incidents and profess to a bland denial of the same. In the heavily monitored and militarized society that Sri Lanka has become, despite the ending of active conflict three years ago, bare denials do not suffice. They merely become acutely laughable. So what pray, is this 'sovereignty' that Ministers and public officials, are fond of pontificating on? Is national sovereignty limited to the right of local politicians to abduct, kill, torture and slander people, to plunder and lay waste to the land? What rights does the common person possess, minorities or majority? As the Supreme Court has affirmed in countless (now useless) judgments, even a common criminal has the right to be dealt with in terms of the law. This is a basic principle of legality. So while the public has sufficient common sense not to treat Gunaratnam quite as a 'gentleman' as one Minister was heard to loudly warn, legal procedures need to be observed. Yet the law is degraded almost irretrievably, the courts are rendered passive and judges are reduced to mere bystanders. To horribly pervert Winston Churchill's ringing call to the English people to suit the local context, never before was so much power wielded by so few and so blatantly against the common good. And it is this very Government which, through its discarding of the law and of the Constitution, has opened up this country to internationalization of its internal affairs though its political leaders may roar to the contrary. read more..