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That was a resounding blow to the face of a government that has come increasingly to believe or being pushed into believing, that might over right is the way to rule.

Had the Supreme Court not determined that the Bureau of Rehabilitation ACT as presented should rightly rest at the bottom of a waste bin, as it were, rather than in the statute books, Sri Lanka would have had another draconian law to add to those that have recently been resurrected and employed against dissenting voices.

Sri Lanka’s apex court held that as the Bill stood it was unconstitutional on the whole.

Who fathered this Bill and where it emerged from is not too hard to guess. It has the stench of a repressive cocktail put together by those who labour under the delusion that national security must necessarily involve the suppression or incarceration of those who think differently and believe there are more humane and legal paths to governance.

Earlier this month another law that had been lying in the attic of forgotten things was dusted and brought to life in the way of High Security Zones, another piece of idiocy by those ignorant of the intent of the Official Secrets Act or deliberately stretched it beyond its elasticity for purposes that were clearly intended to fit firmly into the framework of their rigid and contorted thinking.

That evil intent was quickly ended when President Ranil Wickremesinghe who signed the Extraordinary Gazette that created this extraordinary concept of high security zones to preserve non-existent state secrets in some unusual places, was quickly withdrawn before the government turned governance into an even bigger tragi-comedy, locally and internationally, than it has been in the last couple of years.

Here in London, Prime Minister Liz Truss recently selected by the Conservative Party membership of about 0.01 of the voting population and not by public choice, reminded one of the recent presidential ‘election’ in Sri Lanka.

She however did the decent thing by resigning last Thursday after just 44 days in office.

Her economic policies caused negative market reactions, the Pound Sterling dropped in value and an angry public faced with mounting living costs, unbearable energy prices, rising mortgages, called for her to quit. And she did, having told parliament the previous day that she was a fighter and would not throw in the towel.

Of course, such things do not happen in the “country like no other” and Asia’s first democracy though Urban Development Minister Prasanna Ranatunga boasted in our House by the Diyawanna Oya that Sri Lanka follows Westminster traditions. Perhaps that non-existent Orara University in Australia had failed to tutor him in the ways of the House of Commons and of the political parties therein.

While public opinion and mistrust of Liz Truss even within her own Conservative Party has forced her out of No 10 Downing Street, it took the Sri Lanka public to seek redress from the country’s highest court against a dangerous draft law tinsel-wrapped in a euphemistic title called “Bureau of Rehabilitation Act”.

It throws one’s mind back to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most famous novel “Gulag Archipelago” and more recently China’s “re-education” schools for the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province which also serve the purpose of ‘straightening out’ the thinking of this Muslim ethnic community through rehabilitation.

Just last month a young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini was arrested in Teheran by the country’s Morality Police for wearing her hijab–the head scarf usually worn by Muslim women–“too loosely” and dragged away to detention.

Within hours of her arrest, she died apparently of assault by the police, resulting in widespread riots across Iran led by Iranian women many of whom discarded their headscarves, burnt them or cut their hair in protest. Such mass protests by women against a rigid and repressive Islamic regime was unparalleled in Iran.

By an interesting coincidence the very day the Supreme Court gave its determination, the Bar Human Rights Committee (BHRC) of England and Wales was discussing the same Bill, among other recent developments in Sri Lanka that were fast eating into the country’s democratic traditions and institutions with cancerous rapidity.

This virtual panel event in London was chaired by Aswini Weereratne QC (now KC since UK has a King) Vice-Chair of the BHRC and Vice-President of the Association of Sri Lankan Lawyers in the UK (ASLLUK), with three participants from Sri Lanka.

Titled “Diminishing Democracy” and devoted mainly to human rights and the rule of law in Sri Lanka, the panel consisted of Dr Deepika Udagama, professor at Peradeniya University, a former head of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka and a human rights activist; Upul Jayasuriya PC and a former President of the Sri Lanka Bar Association and Ambika Satkunanathan, a former commissioner of the Human Rights Commission and an activist.

Aswini Weereratne KC in her introduction highlighted the extremely troubled times Sri Lanka is passing through especially in the areas of human rights, the rule of law and economic hardships that resulted in mass public protests and the eventual crushing of the initial “Aragalaya” by the use of force and draconian laws.

She said that some were now calling Sri Lanka a police state

UN experts, it was said, have urged the Sri Lankan government to guarantee the fundamental rights of peaceful assembly and expression during peaceful protests by thousands of people. President Wickremasinghe’s extension of the State of Emergency, the imposition of a curfew, and granting of broad, discretionary powers to the security forces and the military were all denounced by the UN Human Rights office as permitting the detention of protesters and the search of private property without due process or judicial oversight.

Although the emergency was lifted, other outdated and repressive laws–what Deepika Udagama called laws of exception–are being used to harass, arrest and detain peaceful protesters journalists, lawyers and civil society activists.

The three panellists from Sri Lanka brought the participants up to date on the current situation and the increasing use of the security forces to suppress the freedom of speech, peaceful assembly and protest.

What is obviously worrying is the increasing militarisation which started with the now-ousted president Gotabaya Rajapaksa under whom the biggest budgetary allocations for two successive years were for defence.

Between presidents Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe the military has been promoted at least on five occasions with the armed forces packed with so many high-ranking officers that cynics have fallen back on that old saying from the days of America’s Indian wars that the forces are now full of “chiefs and no Indians.”

The panel called for a sea-change in governance where the same old faces that blackened the political landscape are booted out and fresh young politicians with new ideas and clean characters emerge.

That requires new elections, not tinkering with the constitution, piecemeal changes and a country led by a president who lacks legitimacy.

If those changes are not coming from within the existing system because the current government does not wish to relinquish power, the international community needs to push hard on issues such as democracy and impunity, it was said.

The question is whether this government like previous ones led by the Rajapaksas care what the international community thinks. When the UNHRC was still meeting in Geneva and Sri Lanka was on its agenda with an unusually strong resolution on Sri Lanka before it, Colombo came up with the infamous High Security Zones gazette that blatantly violated the law under which it was declared.

Then came the Rehabilitation Bill which the Supreme Court dismissed as unconstitutional, despite the severe strictures in the UNHRC resolution and the new steps the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner is expecting to take with regard to evidence on human rights abuses and accountability.

Last year ahead of the UNHRC sessions Sri Lanka made similar diplomatic errors when two retired navy admirals made unforgiveable faux pas, one proposing a ban on the face covering of Muslim women and the other claiming that India had promised to support Sri Lanka at the UNHRC sessions which lost the country the votes of traditionally friendly countries.

It seems that cocking a snook at the world even if it costs the country dearly while at the same time. extending our hands in beggary is our modern diplomacy.

(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)