Sri Lankan newspapers have reported the drafting of a new law severely curtailing civil liberties and media freedoms. Conscription is one of the provisions of the draft law. Other provisions are expected to be in line with the emergency laws of the past.
This law is likened to the American Patriot Act of 2001. However, for short intervals over the last 30 years, Sri Lanka has effected the most draconian forms of emergency and anti-terrorism laws operating within the country. The reference to the American legislation is therefore merely a crude attempt to justify the reintroduction of laws that were condemned nationally and internationally. Furthermore, if conscription is the purpose of the law, it can be enacted separately, without reference to anti-terrorism provisions.
The earlier emergency and anti-terrorism provisions included the exclusion of all judicial monitoring of inquests, thereby leaving the burial of bodies entirely in the hands of the police. New detention centres were allowed to be maintained, separate from those authorised legally. There were provisions for long periods of detention without prisoners given access to their families and lawyers. The result of these laws were massive disappearances in the country’s southern, northern and eastern regions, the maintenance of torture chambers on a large scale, arrest without any safeguards and burial by cremation which left no evidence of torture or ill treatment.
The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has constantly noted that the authoritarianism of former presidents Jayawardena and Premadasa is now being reenacted in the country. (See AHRC AS-102-2006 for more discussion.) These two presidents used the pretext of anti-terrorism to consolidate their power and prevent free and fair elections. Their reign is popularly known as the period of terror. Their main aim was to manipulate the electoral process through extreme violence. State agencies including the military and police were used for these ends.
The present government’s refusal to make proper appointments to the Constitutional Council and other bodies created under the 17th Amendment is part of the reenactment to authoritarianism and absolute power. Impediments towards the 17th Amendment appointments such as disagreements among the minority parties are in fact being used as a pretext for gaining absolute power. (See AS-063-2006 for more discussion.) Similarly, the recent rise in tension between the LTTE and the government are also being used for the same ends.
It is clear that the present government is aiming to attack the electoral process and remain in power for as long as possible, following the legacy of the former presidents. Anti-terrorism is merely a pretext. The ‘closing of the electoral map’, a term used by former president Jayawerdena, is a necessary consequence of the 1978 authoritarian model of the executive presidency; there is no way to keep this model of government in power as long as the electoral process allows people to intervene. The major concern of all executive presidents since 1978 has been subverting the electoral process.
Having closely observed the situation in Sri Lanka for a long time now, the AHRC draws the attention of Sri Lankan citizens and the international community, that it is the lives and liberties of everyone in the country that are now at stake. The AHRC has previously warned that Sri Lanka’s recent past of terror can return at any time; there have been no serious reforms in the structure of power that created that terror. Absolute power cannot be achieved without committing gross human rights violations.
Such violations will particularly target the media, human rights activists and all political opponents. The country’s past experience has shown that in periods of terror the lives of large numbers of innocent people are taken by the actions of various persons who will use times of instability to deal with their enemies. The rule of law, which has been noted by everyone to be at its lowest ebb even now, will suffer in the same way as it did in the past. In fact, there is cause to believe that the situation may even be worse this time. While in the initial stages of the Jayawardena and Premadasa authoritarianism there existed some resistance in civil society and the judiciary, this resistance no longer exists.
In the short period before this law comes into being, unless civil society and the international community gear themselves towards action to protect basic human rights, an unimaginable destruction may occur. The AHRC therefore calls upon all Sri Lankan citizens and international agencies to request the government to immediately abolish the proposed law. All individuals concerned with democracy must initiate and participate in a debate regarding this law, and should call upon the president, his cabinet and other government officers to also speak out about this law.
