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Several rather fantastic claims in respect of restoring the Rule of Law were made by the Government at the highest levels this week.

Droll statements at talkfests
Ideally the Government’s commitment to closing the spluttering legal and investigative processes on killings of Sri Lanka’s scribes in the Rajapaksa decade should have been the main focus during a talkfest in Colombo on ‘Ending Impunity for Journalists.’ Instead what emerged was the blistering attack by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on the private media’s many sins. That was accompanied by the frankly droll statement by the Minister of Law and Order that the police will (now?) prioritize ‘cases violating freedom of expression’ including some recent incidents in the North which the Minister appears, on all accounts, to have been blissfully unaware of.

So it takes an international conference for the responsible Minister to assure the public that law and order agencies will activate themselves on gross abuses against journalists? Who exactly are the credulous souls inclined to accept these assurances as credible currency? Certainly they will not persuade many citizens who are sick and tired of exaggerated claims, issued with great flair by politicians even as the Rule of Law flounders in a quagmire of confusion.

At its core, there is a grain or more of truth in the Prime Minister’s accusations. Quite evidently the professionalism of Sri Lanka’s media (once the envy of the region) has sharply deteriorated. This is in common with the equally deplorable decline of standards in the legal, medical professions as well as in academia. Less said meanwhile of the palpable loss of sanity among the political class, the better. This symbolizes the wholesale degradation of societal norms and values in this country. That is the painful price that we have paid for decades of vicious conflict, hate and distrust.

The duties of the Government
And no doubt, journalists in the privately owned media have their own agendas, political or personal as these may be. There is little mystery about this or about the Rajapaksa ‘taming’ of the media with the whip as well as the golden carrot. Indeed, that knife sharply cuts both ways. As much as some media is accused of Rajapaksa-bias quite rightly, others are accused of toeing the Government’s agenda.

But that is not the point at which we are. Even conceding all this, the Prime Minister’s logic is questionable at several levels. First, linking the absence of journalists at the impunity summit to the conclusion that the media community is not interested in bringing the killings of its own to justice is bizarre. One does not necessarily or logically follow the other. Indeed, many do not prefer to attend events held with pomp and show in Colombo’s five star hotels with no public impact whatsoever for the simple reason that they are assessed as ‘prattling’ exercises of limited value.

Second and more importantly, regardless of the sins of Sri Lanka’s media of which some may be perceived but others are very real, the responsibility of bringing the criminal justice process to a head in pending cases is fairly and squarely on the Government’s shoulders. That duty cannot be shrugged off by grandstanding on the decline of the media by the Prime Minister or by the Minister of Law and Order.

Impact of the Gintota violence
Meanwhile, the recent Sinhala-Muslim communal violence in Gintota brings another array of issues to the debate. The fear psychosis visiting Muslim communities in the wake of the violence which had led to considerable damage to shops, property and vehicles is undoubted.

Reportedly the Government has decided to prosecute those implicated in the Gintota violence under the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Act No 56 of 2007 (the so-called “ICCPR Act”). The Act prohibits the propagation of religious hatred and provides a remedy to the High Court against executive or administrative action. The remedy should be invoked within three months of the alleged infringement either by the person whose rights have been infringed or are to be infringed or by a person on his behalf.

It must be noted that this assertion that the ‘ICCPR Act’ would be resorted to in regard to these incidents conflicts to some extent with the Law and Order Minister’s recent claim in Parliament that no dereliction of their duties on the part of state law officers had been evidenced. Regardless, this is the first instance of the Act being actually used since its enactment in 2007. For long, it had ‘decorated’ Sri Lanka’s statute book and little more. Meant to give effect to human rights “which have not been given recognition through legislative measures”, the Act reproduces only a few selected rights out of the more than twenty-two substantive rights contained in the ICCPR.

The Government cannot divest itself of a core responsibility
In brief, the Act prohibits the propagation of war, religious hatred and so on and secures the right of every person to recognition as a person before the law, procedural entitlements to an accused including the right to have the assistance of an interpreter in Section 4(1)(e), protection of the rights of a child as well as the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs, either directly or through any representatives and to have access to benefits provided by the State. In the Determination communicated to the Speaker upon the Bill being referred to the Supreme Court as an “urgent bill” at the time, the Court stated that the jurisdiction of the High Court should be limited to “residual rights” that are not within the limits of the constitutional rights chapter.

But whether in the case of the killings of journalists or in the incidents on communal violence at Gintota, what matters is not only the law but how the law is employed by responsible state agencies. This is where impunity stops.

As much as we may chuckle at statements of politicians at conferences, this Government is held to an infinitely higher standard than what was expected from the Rajapaksas. It cannot absolve itself of a core responsibility of the Rule of Law by holding forth on the defaults of others.
That must be clearly emphasized.