The 20th Amendment to the Constitution
The 20th Amendment to the Constitution was passed into law on 22 October, with 156 of the 225 parliamentarians voting in favor of the amendment, after a mere two-day debate, overruling the Opposition’s request for at least four days of deliberation.
It is noted that the Amendment undoes most of the reforms brought about by the 19th Amendment adopted only in 2015. Critically, it introduces judicial appointment procedures which are incompatible with principles of justice by reintroducing the Parliamentary Council, consisting only of political actors.
That body serves to merely advise the President, regarding appointments to the judiciary and other key public institutions.
The 20th amendment gives the President sole and unfettered discretion to appoint all judges of the superior courts. Under international standards, appointments to the judiciary should not be vested solely with the executive.
Even given the gravity of the constitutional changes, the Government had suspended Standing Order 50 (2), which requires every bill to be referred to the relevant Sectoral Oversight Committee for consideration prior to being debated in parliament.
Objectives
Even a hurried reading of the 20th Amendment tells the reader that its framers are motivated by the following two immediate political objectives:
- Creation of a new office of Executive Presidency and granting to the holder to that office unfettered and unchecked powers over the Cabinet, the legislature, the judiciary, the political system, and society. The office of the President will once again be, as it was in 1978 and 2009, the central institution of state power which will stand above, and superior to, everything, and everybody, else in our society and polity.
- Assigning and securing to one ruling family the monopoly of political power in Sri Lanka.
Consequences
There are many negative consequences of the proposed 20th Amendment if it is passed into law by Sri Lanka’s parliament. Some are short-term and others are both medium and long-term. It has the most destructive potential to create conditions for:
- Bringing an effective end to Sri Lanka’s much-venerated parliamentary democracy and liberal democratic traditions and institutions.
- Creating a political system in Sri Lanka similar to the one we have had under the pre-1931 colonial state, thereby ignoring and erasing all the achievements and advances the Sri Lankan people have made in terms of political progress since 1931.
- Making it difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge the incumbent ruling family or whomsoever who occupies the office of President, from power by peaceful and electoral means.
- Depriving the people of Sri Lanka their sovereign right to change governments and remove rulers who violate their trust by peaceful means available within the framework of open, competitive, multi-party, and electoral democracy.
- Granting constitutional sanctity to the arbitrary exercise of political power by the Executive, with only very restricted, if not non-existent. opportunities for society to exercise any control within the framework of Rule of Law which has so far been the cornerstone of Sri Lanka’s constitutionalism.
- Eventually establishing a one-party state in Sri Lanka in line with the much dreaded South-East Asian developmental state model.
- Making liberty and freedoms of citizens vulnerable to arbitrary executive action in a situation in which new law reforms would seek to severely restrict (a) freedom of thought (b) freedom of expression (c) freedom of association and (d) right to dissent.
- Facilitating a swift transition from a weak democracy to an autocratic and tyrannical system of government.
With those consequences, Sri Lankan citizens will have to watch a rather tragic situation in which: (a) Parliamentary democracy is used to ensure its own negation, that is, ending parliamentary democracy itself, (b) One hundred and fifty or so Members of Parliament would be asked to sign their symbolic death warrant collectively by voting for the new constitutional amendment
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