Editorial

The Supreme Court this week dismissed in two sentences, petitions relating to the constitutionality of Executive Presidential decisions. It disallowed the petitioners Leave to Proceed with their cases thus not having to give detailed reasons for their decision.

This decision has legitimised those Executive decisions challenged before the court though one of the issues, that of holding – or not holding a parliamentary election on June 20 now is of academic interest.

Had the Parliament elected in 2015 been allowed to run its full term, these elections would anyway have been held only in October this year. There’s now a sense of urgency on the part of the Government, however, to rush through an election before the deteriorating economy gets any worse.

Public health notwithstanding owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no question that a parliamentary election is high priority — not so much for the reasons trotted out by the Government, but because a country sans an elected Parliament for too long is not in the best interests of Constitutional Government.

Administering a nation by Executive Presidential fiat for an extended period is fraught with potholes on the democratic highway. The Government stubbornly refused to recall the old Parliament opting to interpret the Constitution the way its hurrah boys saw it. It was no different to past Governments. The sum effect of it, however, is the country sliding into dangerous terrain in representative Government.

The fact that the Executive President is a former Army officer and prone to placing ex-military personnel in key public sector posts gave credence to those who saw a trend towards the seeds ‘militarisation’ seeping in to an otherwise civilian administration.

The Prime Minister defended this exercise arguing that retired military officers are “civilians”. That premise is technically correct, but wears thin when gun-toting security forces personnel accompany such civilians when they have a job to be done.

The Executive Presidential system sees two countrywide elections costing some Rs. 15 billion because a President and a Parliament have to be elected.

Questions of whether the President has powers to use public funds from the Consolidated Fund after last Tuesday (June 2) also seem academic now. The Government is simply forcing the pace with its own interpretation of the Constitution with no legal or even political impediment to stop the ruling juggernaut from doing as it pleases.

The Government may want to change the Constitution but till it does that it must not trample or make a mockery of the Basic Law of the country. It appears that the Government is getting increasingly comfortable the way it is going about its business in a footloose fashion, administering the nation without a Parliament, without a declared State of Emergency, without a Budget or Vote on Account.

All its actions cannot be put on COVID-19. There’s a need to recalibrate this unorthodox arrangement and bring the country back on track towards proper Constitutional Government before it strays too far from it towards one-party rule.

Human rights: Searchlight on America

The ongoing happenings sweeping the US and spreading to other parts of the world must be so embarrassing for that country’s State Department that has hectored the world about human rights and pontificated on the treatment of minorities to other nations. Condemning authoritarian rulers in countries that do not promote their agenda, the US State Department is seemingly hoist with its own petard.

The incumbent US President is in the eye of this storm. Not having won the popular vote, he has been gunning for the minorities in his country ever since he became a virtual default President. Accused of being a ‘white supremacist’, the Mayor of Atlanta said in an understatement that the US President was “throwing matchsticks into the fire” by his utterances on the ongoing rioting throughout the country.

Some Governors, Mayors and Police chiefs have asked the man to keep his mouth shut and his fingers off tweets. Some Americans may think he is a jackass and a dangerous jackass at that, but he remains a hero to a group of Americans who want to see him re-elected come November.

For Sri Lanka, a President such as this is not all that bad. He has pulled his country out of the UN Human Rights Council where his predecessor sponsored a resolution against Sri Lanka. The Diaspora lobby of the rump LTTE may win over some Congressmen, but the State Department’s wings are clipped today. Mixed signals from the White House make the ‘bleeding hearts’ (overseas) in the State Department  a shadow of what they were in terms of articulating US foreign policy and in bullying smaller nations with homilies on good governance.

An old wound has opened up again in the US; it is called institutionalised racism. Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery (African slaves were treated as property not humans); Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after a million people marched to Washington DC the previous years under the leadership of Martin Luther King, to give black Americans equal rights hitherto enjoyed only by whites, including the right to vote.

These past few days have seen millions of liberal, educated white Americans stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those protesting continuing racial discrimination in their country. Yet, many Americans just cannot seem to rid themselves of the anti-black, anti-brown and anti-Hispanic DNA in their blood. The world’s searchlight on human rights and minority rights is now on them.