Focus on Rights

Questions of life and death and the 'sanctity' of the law
So much can happen during the ten short days that one is away. Thus, a judicial officer of the High Court, (on the eve of his appointment to the Court of Appeal) and who, exceptionally, maintained his independence during the most dangerously turbulent times that we have seen so far in regard to the institution of the judiciary in Sri Lanka, is casually killed.

Not long thereafter, a petitioner who had obtained the largest award of compensation from the Supreme Court for torture at the hands of the police as a consequence of which he suffered renal failure, is also slaughtered. His killing occurs just prior to his giving evidence in a case instituted by the Attorney General under the Conven-ion Against Torture Act, No 22 of 1994 against the police officers.

And, then, as if in scarcely believable and more than a little obscene counterpoint, we have the elites gathering together to soliloquize on the Rule of Law in learned discussions that, as aptly remarked by a silk who has also held high public office, amounted to little more than a 'pus vedilla.' As Lorca once commented with biting and pungent wit, these are the 'apolitical intellectuals' who preoccupy themselves with eating tortillas and discoursing on their abstract theories while human beings die about them in the most unimaginably degraded states.

One remembers a very different inst-ance in 1999 when the same keynote speaker at those sessions, one of Sri Lanka's most eminent legal personalities, H.L de Silva rolled up his shirt sleeves on the podium, (just prior to the appointment of then Attorney General Sarath Nanda Silva, bypassing the senior most Supreme Court judge at that time, Justice Mark Fernando), before going on to expand on the practicalities as well as the theory that should govern judicial appointments. This time around, the dynamics appear to have been very different.

It is thus that we remain bedeviled with the most profound contradictions in our societal functioning; where personal egos supersede questions of life and death; where the death penalty is advocated as a quick fix for far more serious lacunae in the functioning of the law and order processes; where the president of this country's Bar Association abysm-ally forgets himself so far as to all but exhort lawyers not to appear for the alleged killers of Judge Sarath Ambepitiya and where, (so very paradoxically), we see proposals to give enhanced powers of detention to the police despite the real nexus now established between organised crime and all levels of the police service.

But strip away these banal frivolities and what do we have as the core? There are more similarities between the killings of Sarath Ambepitiya and Gerald Perera than what is immediately apparent. Both cases are a direct consequence of the rude displacing of the old notions of sanctity with which courts, their officers and all whose appeared before these institutions had been regarded.

One cannot say that these deaths were not forewarned. It was not long ago that we had the attempted rape of another High Court judge. What measures of security were put into place thereafter for these judicial officers? The assassination of Judge Ambepitiya was an incident waiting to happen.

Where Gerald Perera was concerned, the need for protection of himself and his family members had been long standing. In general, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, in subjecting Sri Lanka's fourth and fifth periodic reports under the Civil and Political Rights Covenant to severe scrutiny last year, called upon the Government to establish a witness protection program. What steps has the State had taken in this respect through its arms, the Attorney General's Department and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in particular?

In an additional note of pathos, he had not yet been paid the eight lakhs of rupees determined as medical costs by the Supreme Court, up to the time of his death. This, is then, the way that the Court is being flouted and scorned.

But how indeed, can sanctity for the court be preserved when the judicial and legal processes are so gravely undermined that the direction of a case based on political factors is no longer something to be marvelled at, where citizens rights are openly scoffed at, (in some instances, from the judicial bench at the highest level itself), and when the key figures in organised crime in this country owe their survival to good friends within the police, the political structures and even higher places and can afford, indeed, to thumb their fingers at the law and all it professes?

At some point, these elements were all bound to come together in an explosion of violence that caught up in its vortex, the lives of two individuals who, in their vastly different ways, were explicitly not part of that cynical charade. Whether they should be glorified by the term "martyr" or not is far from the core question. Rather, we should let their deaths be the catalyst for genuine action as opposed to the holding of arid seminar sessions.

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