As the Rajapakse Presidency pushes ahead with its impeachment of the Chief Justice, UNP and Opposition leader Ranil Wickramasinghe pulled off his own coup within the UNP. He convened a party convention which met on December 1^st, amended its constitution to ensure that the UNP elects its leader only once in six years and not annually as at present. He also succeeded in according to himself the right to appoint the all the office bearers in the Party, with some minimal concurrence of the UNP’s Working Committee. Essentially Ranil is now entrenched as UNP leader till 2018, till much after the next presidential and parliamentary elections are due. Right after his Party election, Ranil gave a speech to the party faithful at the convention, that now secure as Party Leader he wants to take on the Rajapakse regime. He vowed to ensure a UNP administration by 2014.

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Former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (CBK) has since leaving office in 2005, at the conclusion of two consecutive terms, generally stayed above the fray of the Sri Lankan political divide. She has instead focused her energies and attention more on the world stage as an elder statesperson, directing her energies towards issues such as education of the girl child in South Asia, eradication of extreme poverty, the role of women in peace building and post conflict reconciliation. The Clinton Global Initiative, the Club de Madrid and her own Foundation have been the institutional framework from which this work is being done.

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(i) The document dated 14/11/2012 contains no charges in Law.

(ii) The purported charges even if proved do not constitute proved misbehavior within the meaning of Article 107(2) of the Constitution and therefore cannot result in the impeachment of our client.

(iii) The purported charges do not constitute charges within the meaning of the Law.

(iv) The purported Standing Orders have no legal validity in Law.

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The speed of the Rajapakse regime’s impeachment against the Chief Justice was so swift, at the political speed of a duty free Lamborghini, that the defense against this unrestrained assault on democratic fundamentals in Sri Lanka was slow in coming.

However, starting things off where it should were the lawyers for the Chief Justice who produced a comprehensive and stinging refutation of the main charges against her, that of large sums of money in her account. The explanation which was also quite easily established and readily proved was something likely to be quite common in Sri Lanka, an overseas based family member remitting money for the purchase of an asset in Sri Lanka, in the CJ’s case, her sister sending funds for the purchase of an apartment in Colombo.  Her lawyers reiterated what the CJ’s young son in his Face book profile first clearly indicated, the Chief Justice was not going to be intimidated and go quietly; she was going to fight this tooth and nail.

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Earlier this week, two important events occurred in two very different worlds, in the United States, the American electorate after a long and grueling political campaign reelected President Barack Obama, their first African American President, to a second term in office. At the same time, in Sri Lanka, the Speaker of Parliament, Chamal Rajapakse, entertained a motion by more than half the MPs in Parliament to impeach Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranaike, Sri Lanka’s first woman Chief Justice, just hours after her Court had delivered yet another judicial setback for the government, ruling that certain provisions of the proposed Divineguma Bill violated the Constitution and would be required to be passed with a special two third majority in Parliament. Read the rest of this entry »