Cold war between Govt. and Judiciary continues

Sunday, October 07, 2012

By Our Political Editor= Speaker to make statement in Parliament on Tuesday on alleged violation of Parliament's powers = Magistrate dissociates herself from letter against JSC official; focus now on what next with Divineguma Bill Leaders of the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) were preoccupied asserting the role of the Executive in the ongoing cold war with the judiciary this week too. �President Mahinda Rajapaksa who held a breakfast meeting Thursday with publishers of national newspapers and heads of radio and television stations, both private and state, re-iterated the issues involved. It was clear that the major thrust was against a senior official of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC). A Criminal Investigation Department (CID) team has been tasked to probe allegations of sexual harassment against him. The accusations have been made in two separate letters sent to President Rajapaksa by the father of a lady magistrate. One was received in April last year and the other in June this year. In those letters the father in question has claimed that his daughter has been told by the JSC official that she should heed his “requests” if she were to succeed in her career. The letters surfaced after questions were raised at a breakfast meeting Rajapaksa held with national newspaper editors on Thursday September 27. A journalist who said his newspaper had received copies of such letters asked whether they had reached the President too. The President was also asked what action he proposed to take. Though no serious notice was given to such matters, Rajapaksa declared that in the light of the current developments, the complaint would be investigated. Thereafter, the CID was called in. Government supporters holding a demonstration outside Parliament calling for the implementation of the Divineguma Bill The Sunday Times has learnt from authoritative legal sources that Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake who heads the JSC also conducted an investigation of her own. In the presence of two JSC members, she had questioned the official against whom the allegations had been made. He had strongly denied the accusations. The lady magistrate, now serving a station bordering the hill country, was also called in to be questioned. She had dissociated herself from the contents of the letter her father had sent. She has denied the allegations in the letter that has been attributed to her. That has set a poser to CID detectives who now have to determine how the complaint originated. There was an added issue for the lady magistrate. She had also been questioned on how she sought additional Police protection without routing such a request through the JSC. Circulars issued by the JSC, it was pointed out, had insisted that members of the judiciary making requests for personal protection over work related issues should channel those through the JSC. On Thursday morning, Tiran Alles, MP and publisher/proprietor of Ceylon Newspapers (Pvt.) Ltd., asked President Rajapaksa why the government had not reacted to the three-page statement issued by the JSC. In that statement on September 18, among other matters, the Commission said “various influences have been made” regarding decisions taken by them and cited disciplinary action against a judge as an example. It charged that an attempt by the Executive to call for “a meeting with the Hon. Chief Justice and two other Supreme Court judges, was not successful” and added that the JSC has “documentary evidence on this matter.” The Sunday Times was the only English newspaper to publish the full text of the statement in its political commentary on September 23.                                                      Read More