The Island Editorial

A draconian move to bury justice

08 February 2017

The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government is in a mighty rush to bury justice by hurrying it, so to speak. Justice hurried is justice buried, they say. It is reportedly going hell for leather to set up a Criminal Justice Commission (CJC), camouflaged as ‘a tribunal to inquire into corruption’ to deal with high profile financial crimes. The proposed outfit is to be vested with powers to mete out punishment, we are told.

The ill-conceived government move is an indictment on the judiciary whose independence, impartiality and efficiency the yahapalana leaders claim to have restored. The CJC project is counterproductive in that it is tantamount to an expression of the government’s lack of confidence in the judiciary at a time the ruling coalition is coming under increasing international pressure to set up a hybrid court with the participation of international judges.

If the government thinks the local judiciary is not equal to the task of dealing with even bribery and corruption cases properly how can it convince the international community that war crimes allegations can be probed without foreign involvement? Blinded by partisan politics, hatred and political expediency, it has played into the hands of the campaigners for a hybrid war crimes tribunal.

In a way, the government’s predilection for setting up undemocratic institutions should come as no surprise. For, the legitimacy of the so-called national unity government itself is in question. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution provides for a coming together of the winner and the runner-up at a parliamentary election to overcome the constitutional limit on the number of ministers. The UNP should have coalesced with the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), which contested the 2015 general election, and not the SLFP, which is only a constituent of the UPFA. The SLFP was not on the list of political parties in the election fray, was it?

Special presidential commissions, like the one tasked with probing the Central Bank bond scams, may be appointed to conduct thorough investigations into allegations of bribery and corruption and other such offences so that charges can be preferred against the culprits properly. But, the task of conducting trials and meting out punishment to the accused must be left entirely to the judiciary; there must not be any politically motivated parallel court system. Is it that the government thinks the judiciary is not malleable enough?

True, the SLFP-led United Front government appointed a CJC in the 1970s to deal with many suspected insurrectionists, but it, naturally, incurred much public opprobrium. Times were different then with neither the judiciary nor the police being equipped to handle that unprecedented situation, but the CJC was still considered draconian and rightly so. It is unbecoming of the self-proclaimed champions of good governance to resort to such action.

The previous regime was full of rogues who helped themselves to public funds. They must be brought to justice and the stolen funds recovered in keeping with the incumbent government’s pre-election promises. But, the proposed CJC move, which smacks of a desperate measure to target anti-government activists on the pretext of expediting the process of punishing thieves of public funds, cannot be justified on any grounds.

Former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga sounded very confident when she declared in public the other day that a member of the former ruling clan had stolen as much as USD 1 billion. If so, why don’t the yahapalana leaders get cracking? They can have the person concerned arraigned on charges of corruption forthwith. There is no need for a CJC to do so; police and the courts can deal with the suspect concerned.

Interestingly, some of the ministers who have called for a CJC to deal with corruption were key ministers of the Rajapaksa government which was condemned for its corrupt deals. So, they cannot absolve themselves of the blame for bribery and corruption which thrived under that regime simply by defecting to the other camp and pretending to be paragons of virtue. They are calling for stoning sinners in a bid to dupe the public into believing that they are innocent!

Corruption, we repeat, must be probed and culprits brought to justice regardless of their station in life as a national priority. But, the government move to set up a special tribunal to achieve its political objectives in the name of battling corruption must be resisted with might and main lest kangaroo courts should come to replace the existing judiciary.