The fate of a bill to prohibit political parties identifying themselves with a particular race or religion will be decided by the Supreme Court.
Senior Minister and Government Chief Whip Dinesh Gunawardena who presented the bill in parliament last week said yesterday he had referred it to the Supreme Court for a determination on its constitutionality.
The minister who heads the Parliamentary Select Committee on Electoral Reforms said the bill would be amended if the Supreme Court ordered any amendments.
The proposed changes have run into a storm of protests from several political parties including the main opposition UNP, the Sri Lanka, Muslim Congress and the Tamil National Alliance. These parties have filed fundamental rights petitions against the bill.
Meanwhile the Select Committee met on Friday and decided that the debate on the bill which was scheduled for Wednesday would not be held on that date. It will be taken up after the Supreme Court gives its verdict.
Mr. Gunawardena said the amendments were based on the agreement reached by the select committee and agreed to by all political parties in Parliament as could be proven by the minutes of the proceedings of the Committee. He charged several parties were backtracking on what they agreed to in the Committee.
However, SLMC parliamentarian Hassan Ali said they had not been consulted before the bill was drafted. ”We are surprised that this bill was brought before the House. It infringes on our right to identify ourselves with our community and work for them,” he said.
TNA Jaffna district Parliamentarian N. Srikantha said if this bill was passed, it would deny the minorities the right to have political parties of their own. “In any multi ethnic, multi religious country, there are political parties for the minorities and they are needed to address the problems exclusively faced by them,” he said.
The TNA MP said there were no national political parties in Sri Lanka as the so-called national parties were dominated by the Sinhalese Buddhists with only token posts for minorities.
Meanwhile the other recommendations of the committee including a change in the electoral process to make it a mix of the existing Propositional Representation (PR) system and the First-Past-The-Post system also is unlikely to be implemented before the next general election due to lack of consuses among political parties.
“They come and propose one thing and when we study it and go back to the committee, they propose something else. Otherwise we would have finished the work of the select committee by now. It is politics,” Minister Gunawardena said.
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