The new ides of March: Foreign judges have not come … but gone! Beware the emblematic cases!
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by Rajan Philips-March 25, 2017, 8:03 pm
It is not only the ides of March that is new in Sri Lanka. Remember the old example of syllogistic fallacy: "It is either raining or not raining now. But it is not raining now. Therefore, it is raining now"! We can now make a fallacy example out of the government’s current predicament: "Either the government agreed to foreign judges in 2015, or it did not agree. Now it is saying it did not agree.Therefore, the government must indeed have agreed to foreign judges in 2015"! In any event, foreign judges have not come to Sri Lanka, but they are gone, notwithstanding the two-year technical rollover that the UNHRC granted last week to the government on the self-same 2015 resolution. But the UNHRC’s shadow over Sri Lanka is not receding any time soon, because: Beware the "emblematic cases". To my mind, these two words – emblematic cases – carry far more sting than everything else that has come out of Geneva. They could also make the sensibilities of all Sri Lankans converge on a common moral ground instead of getting torn along ethnic lines.
