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• Women MPs call for more measures on women empowerment and child protection  

By Sandun Jayawardana 

The controversy over alleged moves to delay local council elections continues to surface during the committee stage debate of Budget 2023.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe has been in the habit of turning up in Parliament regularly to participate in the Budget debate. He was in Parliament this week as well, though not on Friday when National People’s Power (NPP) Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake raised issue regarding the requirement to have new local councils in place before March 20 next year. To do this, the Election Commission (EC) needs to publish the gazette calling for nominations by the end of December or the beginning of January. 

“The EC already has this power. I saw that the EC has asked the Attorney General (AG) for certain clarifications. But this is totally unnecessary. The EC can gazette the call for nominations even tomorrow.”

In failing to call for nominations and asking the AG for advice, the EC was engaged in a “conspiracy” to delay the local government polls, alleged Mr Dissanayake. He called on the President to come before Parliament and give an assurance that the Government was not planning to take any decision that would infringe on the EC’s right to hold local government elections on schedule.

“The supposedly independent EC is waiting for a signal from the Government. This makes it a commission that is tied directly to a political objective,” he said.

Meanwhile, female MPs and female Parliament staff members wore orange on Thursday (1) in support of the Sixteen Days of Activism campaign against Gender-Based Violence (GBV). Many male MPs from both the government and opposition also wore a wristband with the message “Let’s Unite to end Gender-Based Violence” in support of the campaign. It was also the day when the heads of expenditure of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Women, Child Affairs and Social Empowerment came up for debate.

Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) MP Rohini Kumari Wijerathna noted Sri Lanka had never passed a “gender-responsive budget” and Budget 2023 was no different. Other countries in the region such as Nepal had done this but Sri Lanka has so far lagged behind, she pointed out.

“I confess that I was initially deceived by this Budget. I thanked the President, who is the subject minister for bringing us within the top 10 ministries with the highest budgetary allocations for the first time in history,” she said, referring to the Women and Child Affairs Ministry. “But it was only later that I realised that the Department of Samurdhi is also part of the ministry and most of the funds are allocated for Samurdhi payments.”

The SJB MP expressed frustration that a ministry that covers women and children, who make up 75% of the country’s population, continues to receive stepmotherly treatment from every government.

Female representation in Sri Lanka’s legislature was two percent in 1931, which was better than even the UK Parliament at the time. While female representation in many other legislatures has increased, 91 years after the universal franchise was achieved, female representation has only increased up to 5.3 percent in Sri Lanka. This is not something anyone can be satisfied with, President Ranil Wickremesinghe pointed out.

“We can’t blame anyone but ourselves,” Mr Wickremesinghe remarked.

He said the Government was taking several steps to improve women’s rights and representation. “We are drafting two acts related to Gender Equality and Women Empowerment. It is also proposed to establish an independent National Women’s Commission to champion gender equality and women empowerment and make recommendations to Parliament. The government supports it and I hope the opposition too would support it. We also have plans to appoint a female Ombudsman.”

The President said the Government was working in consultation with the Women Parliamentarians’ Caucus and it had also been assigned to attend to matters related to child affairs.

Given that state-sector employees were being paid the same salary irrespective of their gender, it is an insult that female labourers were being paid less than their male counterparts for doing the same work, Women and Child Affairs State Minister Geetha Kumarasinghe said, urging the Government to ensure equal pay for women labourers.

She said the bills on gender equality and women’s empowerment were now being drafted and would be presented to Parliament soon. She added that Government hoped to set up the independent National Women’s Commission next year.

Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) MP Dr. Sudarshani Fernandopulle, who now sits with the opposition, called on the Government to encourage setting up daycare centres and introduce minimum standards to regulate them. She noted that only 34 percent of female graduates were currently employed in the workforce, though the majority of students who enter universities were female.

Dr Fernandopulle, who is the chairperson of the Women Parliamentarians’ Caucus, noted women and children were especially vulnerable in the present context where they were being severely burdened by the ongoing economic crisis. Pointing to recent media reports of children being killed or attacked, she called on the authorities to intensify efforts to safeguard children.

The MP also called for the criminalisation of corporal punishment and to close any legal loopholes that allowed the practice to continue. “There is a misconception that the best way to discipline children is to punish them. This is wrong because when the child grows up, he or she too will be prone to unleashing violence on others. The same goes for incidents of domestic violence. Children, especially males who grow up in households where domestic violence takes place can become abusers themselves once they become adults,” she warned, calling for funding to strengthen mechanisms to eradicate domestic violence.

The committee stage debate continues next week, with the vote on the third reading due to be held on Thursday, December 8.