Sri Lanka is Already ‘Quasi Unitary’
Our empirical evidence show, although I have not exhausted all, that with the 13th Amendment, our state system has transformed relatively into a new form. The Supreme Court’s majority determination also noted that ‘devolution should be distinguished from decentralization.’ Decentralization is primarily a device in a unitary state, but devolution moves beyond its parameters.
by Laksiri Fernando
( January 6, 2016, Sydney, Sri Lanka Guardian) There are possibilities that the debates on the new constitution making process becoming polarized on ‘unitary’ versus ‘federal’ lines. This is unfortunate because the ‘old distinctions’ between the two do not exist any longer. The distinctions or differences are within a broad spectrum of state or constitutional types, and not between the above binary categories. It is only at the two extreme points that ‘pure unitary’ or ‘pure federal’ states may exist, and even that only in theory, but not in practice.
