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.
