Columns

While in Sri Lanka the carnage of Easter Sunday two years ago was being mourned in a moment of collective grief for those killed, in distant Minneapolis history was being made.

Justice was done for the brutal killing by police of one man, a nondescript individual named George Floyd. That unanimous verdict of murder by the jury was a significant moment for rarely — if ever — are US policemen charged for deaths in custody.

If the judgment was to bring justice to one man and his family its significance echoed far beyond Minneapolis. It echoed around the world where discriminated peoples, those suppressed and oppressed and others not yet in chains but experience the inhumanity of man to man, see a faint glimmer of hope that one day justice will come to them too.

President Joe Biden told George Floyd’s seven-year-old daughter Gianna the evening of the verdict “Daddy did change the world.” Even if he did not change the world he certainly shook it up. If one ordinary individual from a deprived community and a discriminated minority whose enforced death could unleash a movement for justice that sparked protests in support in several other countries around the world, it should send some signal to oppressors and their oppressive regimes that one small step for justice could well turn into a giant step for man.

The George Floyd killing is a landmark case of police violence against black people and other minorities such as Latinos and an important outcome for those who have campaigned for reforms to America’s policing system.

But if in the US it is largely a racial issue that is not just restricted to policing and the peculiar mindset of white policemen, it is more widespread and institutionalised. While Floyd’s family and the people of Minneapolis and beyond anxiously awaited the verdict of the jury, two other black persons — a man and a girl — were shot in separate incidents elsewhere.

If one were to count the number of black and Latino victims of police brutality in the last five years it would amount to a shocking number as media and research studies have indicated and activists have made public.

The instances of discrimination against the black community in the US and of physical abuse against them increased in the last years largely because of the so-called American nationalism unleashed by a racist president Donald Trump and his white supremacist hordes who turned the American dream of its founders into a disturbing nightmare of unbelievable horror that saw violence in the streets and towns and cities devastated.

That was the legacy that Trump left behind with his racist sloganising at home and the America First catch phrase stamped all over the world that even America’s allies had had enough of a pompous ass who they were happy to see kicked out of the White House which he thought had been bequeathed to him in perpetuity.

Those accustomed to the ways of most power-hungry politicians know that in their ambitious journey to the top of the totem nothing is allowed to stand in the way. It is no surprise that in Sri Lanka today the so-called educated espouse the hated murderer of millions Adolf Hitler as a role model for national leadership.

As several hundreds who waited anxiously to hear the jury’s verdict against a seemingly unrepentant killer who continued to keep his knee on the neck of a man until he breathed his last, kept their eyes peeled on the court house in Hennepin County Government Center, television brought to the world those last moments before the historic judgment was announced and the outbursts of joy and celebration that followed.

Though the ‘House of Justice’ that people look up to as symbolising justice for all, it is not so for people of different ethnicities, faiths, religions and ideologies as history has shown not just in America but in many parts of world where dictators and autocrats rule and repressive regimes continue to deprive their own people of freedom and liberty.

From Minneapolis to the Megapolis, the cry for justice will reverberate as long as those who champion humanity over inhumanity, justice over injustice, morality over immorality continue to battle on despite the overwhelming power against them, be it in China, Myanmar or Putin’s Russia.

What happens inside some of those chambers of the Houses of Justice in different parts of the world is a travesty of justice where judiciaries packed with friends, stooges and backboneless legal nannies do not dispense justice, but dispense with justice.

Some might remember how in 2019 Donald Trump pushed one of his friends to fill a vacancy in the US Supreme Court. It raised such a rumpus that the candidate Brett Kavanaugh faced impeachment and was only saved by Republican cronies in Congress.

Interestingly, one of those who led the charge for Kavanaugh’s impeachment for sexual misconduct is current US Vice President Kamala Harris saying that he “lied to the US Senate and more importantly to the American people”.

But Kavanaugh escaped the indictment and managed to enter the Supreme Court where he provided Trump with a majority. Packing courts at the highest level with friends and stooges happens not only in the United States as we well know.

It is vital to have your faithful in the highest courts so that the all the jiggery-pokery of the political rulers can be legitimised and given a veneer of moral credibility by a wave of the legal wand in the hands of tainted judges.

Since the 16th century, there has been a figure of a blindfolded lady holding the scales in one hand and a sword in the other to represent the impartiality of justice. For convenience I suppose, she is called Lady Justice. This allegorical personification is seen in most if not all court houses in the United States. Even though it might not be displayed in the rest of the world as it is in the US the significance of Lady Justice is not lost among the legal fraternity, the political classes and to the judicial systems of most countries.

The blindfold over the eyes of Lady Justice represents a justice system that is meant to be blind to power, wealth, race, ideology and gender. That is why in some countries under autocratic and authoritarian rule what the lady represents is not just blindfolded but blinded.

History shows that those in the judicial system including judges have joined and conspired tainting and undermining the independence of the judiciary that some politicians strongly favour- verbally and publicly at least.

If the judicial system was so squeaky clean and judges were impartial and beyond reproach, one wonders why so much time, energy and effort have been spent in formulating the Bangalore Principles of Judicial Integrity – principles the United Nations has urged member-states to incorporate into Judicial Codes of Conduct in their own countries?

Surprisingly — or perhaps not — Sri Lanka does not have a code of conduct for its judges. Some might speculate that they are beyond reproach and so do not need one unlike judiciaries in some other UN member states.

How comforting.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)