Editorial

A round this time each year, there comes a flurry of activity on such issues as gender equality, women’s rights and violence against women, all because the International Day for Women is tomorrow. Unfortunately, for the rest of the year, these subjects go into the limbo of forgotten things until March 8 rolls up again next year.

A high profile case has even gone to the courts, hotly contested and keenly lobbied outside court as well; one party claiming gender discrimination and the other saying it has nothing to do with gender, only a procedural flaw.

In India, there is an uproar over what has been called a sexist direction by no less a person than the Chief Justice of their Supreme Court where he has asked an alleged rapist brought before his bench to marry his victim if he is to be let off the hook. Sri Lankan courts have witnessed a somewhat similar approach not long ago in slightly different circumstances. With mounting actions for statutory rape of minors and a string of habeas corpus cases where parents complained girls were being abducted, the courts abandoned the minimum punishment stipulated by law if the parties married. Sometimes, the cases also became ‘academic’ in a practical sense, because the parties themselves voluntarily married while their cases were pending. These were real-life problems that confronted even the courts.

On the other hand, it seems like modern-day China, long derided and justifiably so, for its human rights record has passed a progressive new civil code that has seen the court order a husband to compensate his wife for “unpaid labour” — the value of the domestic work done during their marriage. Here in Sri Lanka, the present Government appears also to have embarked on the right path in modernising medieval laws, one being on child marriages by upping the age limit for girls so that they can complete their education at the very least, and have more of a say in selecting their life partner.

The modern world has also created modern-day issues for women, especially young girls. New forms of violence against women emanate from the world wide web (internet) offline and online. Technology is the newest tool to harass, exploit and commit crimes against women. Ordinary police stations around the country are just not geared to handle these crimes. It is time the Police came up to speed with the growing criminal activity in cyberspace.

These new and dangerous trends apart, the Government continues to score poorly on important issues relating to women in workplaces of the three highest foreign exchange earning sectors in the country’s economy viz., the tea plantations, the garment industry and the expatriate workers in West Asia and the Gulf in the main. And this is leaving out the tourism industry where, too, women play a significant part.

If one is to single out the female expatriate workers as the worst affected of the lot, it is pathetic, to put it mildly, that this Government opted to withdraw as many as 84 Labour Officers in 14 diplomatic missions abroad on grounds of a lack of finances. These officers were meant to be of assistance mainly to Sri Lankan women workers. Sri Lankan workers abroad remitted seven billion life-saving dollars to the economy, and the astounding excuse of the Government was that the Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) was “bankrupt”.

Making that decision tantamount to criminal negligence was the fact that this withdrawal came right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and when thousands of women were left stranded in refugee camps in foreign lands.

Repeated and heart-rending requests for their early repatriation fell on deaf ears in Colombo and to date, at least another 40,000 are waiting to return home.

This is a textbook case of Sri Lankan women being treated as second class citizens by their own Government. So much for women’s rights and the International Day for Women. The women MPs who have submitted a report on gender equality can start their campaign here and now.

PC polls: Anything but devolution

 It seems a ‘political decision’ has been firmed up to hold Provincial Council elections in the next three months. No one knows for sure the reason for this fast forwarding when the ruling coalition itself was divided between holding elections in the nine provinces and scrapping the entire PC system.

With no official comment either confirming or denying our front page story last week that elections are to be held in June, one might assume that the reasons could vary from one or all of the following; the Government is being arm-twisted just like the 1987 Government was to implement the PCs; it is a sop to Cerberus (read the Geneva Resolution and the UNHRC); or the ruling coalition believes it is better to have these elections sooner than later given its own receding popular standing amidst an economy on a downward trend, and an Opposition still not getting its act together.

If elections are indeed to be held in June, it means campaigning will have to start almost immediately in the middle of the battle against the COVID-19 virus. Laws need to be in place as well. There will, therefore, be a flurry of election-related activity in the weeks ahead.

It is a pity that the wing of the ruling coalition that campaigned to reject the PC system as a ‘white elephant’ both financially and administratively, was unable to draw up an alternative plan for devolution. The transfer of power from the Centre to the periphery is now an internationally recognised call. Provinces are economic powerhouses in their own right and people in the countryside need not rely entirely on the capital for their day-to-day life.

However, Provincial Council elections have only been a muscle-flexing exercise by the contesting political parties and have very little to do with real devolution. The Northern Provincial Council is a classic example. What’s more, India which is pushing for elections to these councils would rather have their fifth columnists in place in the Northern Provincial Council rather than the Central Government have control of it.