13A: Under The Gavel Again
Dharisha Bastians
The controversial provincial council act that proved the most proximate reason for the sacking of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake from office may soon be returned to the Supreme Court as an Urgent Bill, with the Government soon likely to seek the court’s determination on the constitutionality of amendments to the 13th Amendment that will dilute the powers of the councils and ensure they never stand in the way of the will of the central government again.
After the sound and fury that was the impeachment of Sri Lanka’s first female Chief Justice in January this year, a quiet revolution has been underway in the country’s judicial system. The impeachment saga involving the country’s top judge brought Hulftsdorp and its inner workings briefly into the limelight. But in the aftermath of the appointment of Shirani Bandaranayake’s successor, the complex and now fractured legal system has returned to operating in the shadows at least in the sense that average citizens know or comprehend little about its workings. Transfers, new appointments, strange and astounding proclamations from the benches of the courts have once again been relegated to basic reportage without context. Their brief awakening during the impeachment ordeal now ended, the citizenry has resumed its customary apathy, providing the incumbent administration that was gravely wounded by the illegitimacy of its actions in removing Chief Justice Bandaranayake a lifeline with which to consolidate its power over the judicial organ of the state.
The brutal impeachment of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake was fobbed off repeatedly by skeptics of its impact as being an issue consuming the country’s intelligentsia and political elite, with little or no consequence for the average Sri Lankan. Efforts to stay the regime’s hand in removing Bandaranayake from office by the legal fraternity and civil society were dismissed as being attempts to effect regime change and discredit Sri Lanka internationally. Judicial independence, rule of law and an ethical procedure for the removal of senior judges were pooh-poohed as being high-brow and immaterial to the common man.
The common man’s conundrum
