Sunday Times 2
Deaths in police custody: Dearth in law and order
View(s):All police officers are part of, and have a duty to serve, the community.
Enhancing police accountability and integrity is primarily meant to establish, restore or improve public trust and rebuild the legitimacy that is a prerequisite for effective policing. This may be achieved through establishing civilian oversight that is responsive and accountable to the needs of the people. The failure in this regard needs examination.
Deaths in police custody are current news and have become amatter of heightened public concern. The immediate reason for this discussion today is the death of Nishatha Kumarasiri, 37, at Veyangoda while in police custody.
Deaths of suspects in police custody are a continuing feature with little let or hindrance. This practice is also termed extrajudicial killings.
These incidents deal a deadly blow to law and order, a subject popularly assigned only to police. If the breakdown of order is at the hands of the police and is that blatant, the question that begs an answer is: how is it then that the police are allowed to engage in these extralegal practices for so long with no check? The point is that the failure is not only of order, but as significantly a collapse of the law and its structures instituted precisely for this purpose to check illegality.
Let us note that the structures for law are widespread. These range from the Justice Ministry, the Judiciary, the Judicial Services Commission, the Magistrates and Inquirers, the Attorney General, the Bar Association of Sri Lanka and the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, on the one side and the President, the Prime Minister, the Police Department and the prisons, on the other.
The former deals with promulgating the law. The latter constituting the Executive deals with the implementation of the law. Then each of these bodies and entities surely has a distinct role to play to check on the failure of law and its intended purpose to check abuse. Together, they can be formidable a force to maintain the law. Is it then not a glaring malfunction of this formidable force that is so ordained for law at considerable public expense? Is it also not this very breakdown, then, of the law structures which permit and give free rein to police to cause ‘escapes’ of suspects from police custody?
The powers are thus ranged on either side of a divide. The judiciary and the law are on one side. The judiciary, the law and the Institutes for Justice somehow ignore police misdemeanor and illegality. No questions are asked by any of the judicial authorities on police misconduct in causing deaths of suspects in police custody. None of these authorities thereby justifies the public expenditure voted for their work. Worse still, they may make excuses of sorts for not serving the public through their duties. These excuses are not in conformity with the law. Thereby the problem of deaths of suspects in police custody, in defiance of the law, is ignored by these powers on this side of the divide. Why?
On the other side is the Executive — the President downwards — from whom Police find encouragement and even cover for their malpractices. The same goes for Parliament which mentions this problem only in passing.
With the high-profile actors forming the ‘formidable force’ taking the centre stage, the community is not given any space, leave aside civilian oversight.
Montesquieu and Tocqueville and their theories of separation of powers may have some resonance with the judiciary and others. But the Executive and the others may not even know of such a concept. The former ignores it conveniently. The latter, the Executive, looks at it vicariously.
The former in this divide, Defence Secretary Kamal Gunaratne, said: “The law is common to all. Some things happen in enforcing the law. This (Veyangoda case) is only one such victim”. Media reports noted that such utterance is intended to terrify society and so the victim’s legs were chopped off and one limb taken away. That was Gen. Guneratne’s ‘blasé’ reaction to the Veyangoda killing, the reports said. Implied was that the suspect deserved what he got.
In this instance, Kamal Guneratne was returning having just paid obeisance to two religious dignitaries at Kandy after his recent promotion to the rank of General. A further question also arises then in this context, how effective is religion in these circumstances, to help the law and also to promote order?
And there is still a further question that also arises. How effective is the oath now taken by all state officers, this time to promote pure governance than good governance on the New Year’s Day, in the very terms as decreed by the President? The problem with the oath in respect of law and order is that it is intoned in religious tenor to uphold the Constitution and Law and Order. The idea behind this is that the oath subscribed to in this tenor will serve better the purpose for which the oath is taken. The patent fact, however, is that the oath administered to all in Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary, has not bound them to higher values. Illustrations by way of example are best avoided. The people are well aware of the reality, the officers including the Police, themselves, know this firsthand.
Therefore, if oaths and religions do not serve a purpose, cynicism cannot be evaded. But there is nonetheless an overlay of religion in every walk of life. There too, a question arises. Is it that religion is only to serve a political purpose at its base? This question is pertinent, though embarrassing. It is difficult for violence and denial of rights to be voiced in the same breath as religious intonation in an oath. The statements of Gen. Guneratne, in that particular context, invoke cynicism.
To clear matters a little more, it is necessary to add that, perhaps over three decades before, such breakdown of the institutions by way of deaths of suspects in police custody were of rare incidence. Law and order then prevailed, in some acceptable measure. Death of a suspect or even mere escape of a suspect from police custody was then an isolated incident. This even resulted in a special investigation against the officers from whose custody the suspect escaped.
We have now come a long way from this, though in the wrong direction. And, yes, people die, regardless of the structures to check illegality, Parliament, Judiciary, Executive President, religion and oaths, and the Police to bell the cat.
(The writer is a Retired Senior Superintendent of Police. He can be contacted at seneviratnetz@gmail.com; T.P. 0774475144)