Impeachment Tragedy And UPR Farce
By C. A. Chandraprema -November 12, 2012
C. A. Chandraprema
Thursday November 1, 2012, was an eventful day if ever there was one. While Sri Lanka was defending itself in Geneva at the Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council, an impeachment motion against Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake was handed over to the Speaker of Parliament in Colombo. Many people thought that the government would be diffident about impeaching the chief justice with the UPR session on Sri Lanka being held these days, and the theory was that even if they do impeach the chief justice, they would wait till the UPR process is over. But the fact that the impeachment motion was handed over to the speaker on the very day that Sri Lanka came up for discussion in Geneva shows that the government means business. Ironically, the US Representative to the Human Rights Council Eileen Donahoe in fact made reference to the impeachment motion in her speech on Sri Lanka and called upon the Sri Lankan government to uphold the independence of the judiciary. This was funny considering the fact that the world’s prime example for flogging the judiciary into submission is in fact the United States of America.
The American constitution is a very simple document which does not specifically say that the American Supreme Court has the power to decide on the constitutionality of laws made by Congress in quite the same words. Article 3 Section 2 which deals with the Judicial power simply says that “The judicial power shall extend to…” and among the things that the judicial power extends to, is mentioned the words ”…the Laws of the United States…”. As we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, it was through the 1803 supreme court ruling in Mabury v. Madison that the US supreme court specifically claimed that the constitution gives them the power to decide on the constitutionality of the laws made by Congress. We explained in this column how President Thomas Jefferson applied the jackboot to the Supreme Court from day one and made them bow to the will of the president and Congress. Yet, here was the American Representative on the UNHRC protesting that Sri Lanka was doing what the Americans had been doing for the past 200 years.
If one looks at things from a different angle, perhaps the US Representative on the UNHRC did have a point. The US has never impeached a chief justice. They never had to, because making an example of someone else was enough to make the US Supreme Court get the message and fall in line. But there is something in Sri Lanka which makes such half measures ineffective. Even our terrorists (both Rohana Wijeweera andPrabhakaran) were uncommonly stubborn and the security forces had to go the whole hog with them. With both the JVP and the LTTE there was never the possibility of a compromise as in Nepal when the Maoist terrorist leader Prachanda came into the mainstream. Perhaps this is so with our supreme court as well. Having been a political correspondent for many years, the present columnist has always been struck by what Karl Marx said of France in his work “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” where he said that France was the one place in Europe where class battles were fought to the finish. So it is in Sri Lanka – every battle, whether it be with terrorists, the Supreme Court or with foreign powers have to be fought to the finish.
