Editorial

With half the world going in for elections this year, President Ranil Wickremesinghe broke his sphinx-like approach to the question of which election is to precede in Sri Lanka when he announced to his ministers this week, that it will be the presidential that will come first.

He kept the date open, but constitutionally it is fixed for October as being the last date. Many were taken by surprise by the comment as they were expecting a Parliamentary election first trotting out theories why that election would be a better choice—for the country, of course.

The guessing game will not cease merely because of the presidential comment. It is not an official statement either. Some even refuse to believe the President, imagining this to be some strategic ploy to get the Opposition wrongfooted. Nothing is a certainty, they argue, pointing out that last year’s local government elections were indefinitely postponed even after nominations were called.

In the parliamentary system, as we see in Britain today, the Government and Opposition are locked in an argument on the date when elections will be held with the Prime Minister having the final say. In India, the Government is proposing a ‘one country; one election’ law that will see the party that wins the national election winning the state governments as well, hopefully. In the US Presidential system, however, election dates are fixed; the entire country knows exactly when the election will be and they elect not only the President but also state Governors, some Senators and public officials on the same day.

The cost Sri Lanka incurs on elections is phenomenal. When earlier it was only a general (parliamentary) election and local government elections that were held, today it’s double that. There are four elections on the cards viz., the presidential, parliamentary, provincial and local, churning out thousands of elected representatives that have to be maintained at public expense.

Recently, the Justice Minister presented a Cabinet paper seeking to change the election law by bringing about a hybrid system of the existing proportional representation (PR) voting system with the old first-past-the-post (FPP) system. His proposal was to have 160 MPs elected on the FPP and 65 on PR. If this country started off with the British Parliamentary system and switched to the French Executive system, now it has a German hybrid election system. No mention in the proposal is made of National List MPs. Again, there is an uproar that this proposal has emerged during election year, and is a ruse to postpone elections.

The minister says the hybrid system is not for the forthcoming elections, but the one after. While governments and parliaments have slept on these reforms for much of their time discussing these over and over again but never implementing anything, that the Government has come up with proposals at the 11th hour triggers suspicion at the timing.

Similarly, there has been the endless, decades-long debate on the abolition of the provincial councils and the executive presidency without a decision. Incumbents don’t talk about it while in office, enjoying the powers and privileges while opposition parties howl of its excesses until elections are on the horizon and suddenly fall mute in the belief that the plums of such offices will fall onto their lap.

With the presidential election now a fait accompli, it will cost only an extra sheet of paper for it to be a referendum by the voters seeking their view if they want to continue with the executive presidency. That should give the next holder of that office a message from the country on the legitimacy of the seat he or she occupies.

More (f) laws

It has been pointed out time and time again that the recent pattern of law-drafting by the Government without consulting relevant stakeholders or ignoring their advice is woefully inept, to say the least. It is like a tyre factory continuously rolling our square tyres rather than reflecting a considered process of reforming existing laws or enacting new laws.

This is all the more problematic in a country which lacks judicial review of enacted law.

The latest bombshell was amendments proposed to the Penal Code by the Ministry of Justice in regard to several aspects of the offence of statutory rape. While making the offence of statutory rape gender neutral in nature is welcome, other proposed changes have resulted in a storm of criticism from activists and professionals and left ordinary citizens aghast.

Primarily, their concern was over reducing the age of consent in regard to statutory rape from 16 years to 14 years. They maintain that this will have the effect of overturning progressive penal law reforms in 1995 intended to protect young girls not having the ability to give informed consent in regard to coerced non-marital sexual relationships. On their part, those advocating the return of the law to a pre-1995 level have not been able to justify their position except to point to the ‘practical realities of teenage relationships’ and the ‘unfair’ stigmatization of young men.

This has been aggravated by the fact that the Justice Ministry-led amendments which have been in the pipeline for some time, have proposed that if there is evidence that rape as already defined in the Code had been with the consent of the victim, a court may have the discretion to impose a suspended sentence. Taken in tandem, these proposed amendments seem to point to the Ministry taking a very liberal view of sexual behaviour among adolescents and practical aspects involving statutory rape.

The concern that the Ministry professes for young men caught up in convictions of statutory rape is moreover not reflected in reality. Sri Lanka’s legal system documents an abysmal number of investigations and convictions in regard to statutory rape where victims often protest that their complaints are not properly investigated by the police. Legendary delays in the court process in regard to cases of sexual violence are another factor.

Our news reports that these controversial amendments have now been withdrawn and will go back to the drawing board. Without addressing these gaps in the process, was this a short cut which was to lead to more injustice for victims of statutory rape? Where then is the protection for young adolescents?