OVERRULED
It is agreed. The Parliament of the Democratic
Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka has reached a consensus that the
judiciary has no right to interfere or intercede in matters that
concern the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) probing the
impeachment of the Chief Justice of the country.
This is a landmark decision not so much for its substance
which should have been obvious, but for the fact that there is
consensus on a matter of such vital import between generally
opposing entities.
This decision could not have and should not have gone any
other way. There would be constitutional gridlock if the
judiciary decided to interfere in any way with the prevailing
powers that are in place to impeach a Chief Justice or a sitting
Supreme Court judge, for instance, of the country.
The constitutional law scholars -- most times partisan no
doubt - - will argue until the cows come home that the judicial
officers cannot come before Select Committees of the
legislature, on matters such as investigations of good behaviour.
But, the fact remains that when there is a lacunae in the
constitution as to the exact procedure by which a judicial
officer is to face impeachment hearings, there is no other
recourse than a Parliamentary Select Committee, for which
procedure there is ample precedent.
This is a matter that strikes at the core of maintaining the
viability of the legislature. No Parliament in any democracy
will countenance its writ being overridden by an unelected
judiciary, when there is precedent in many parts of the world
for judges facing impeachment hearings before Parliamentary
Select Committees, or their equivalents.
The judiciary or any other person or institution cannot be
heard to say that there shall be no impeachment hearings until
the law is changed. This would be ludicrous, and no
self-respecting elected legislature would tolerate such a
mockery of its own standing. As the article bellow states
succinctly, no individual under law has the luxury of changing
the laws as they exist, at the time such an individual is to be
tried for an offence.
What is not on offer to any ordinary citizen of this country,
cannot be made available to the members of the judiciary, be it
in the higher courts or any other.
The constitutional gridlock that's possible if the judiciary
outlaws the Parliamentary Select Committee process, is not
pleasant to contemplate.
There would be a virtual stasis in governance -- and
administration of the Rule of Law would come to a standstill.
This is why a previous Speaker of Parliament in his wisdom
decided that the judiciary shall not pass a writ on Parliament
compelling it to stall proceedings on impeachment.
In every sense, though it boils down to it in practice, it is
not a 'supremacy' issue that is under consideration; rather, it
is an issue of governance. It would be ridiculous to imagine
that the judiciary would censure the workings of Parliament.
That is tantamount to a negation of democracy, and no sane
person should have expected that the judiciary could sanction
Parliament in this way and prevent a PSC, or that there would
not be dire consequences as a result -- for the functionality of
our democracy.
There is no doubt that the people's elected representatives
would assert their authority over the un-appointed judiciary.
All other arguments that take up any different position are
specious, and are generally self-serving, as the comment on the
top of the opposite page would indicate.
It is one thing for a person to argue that ideally there
should be a better mechanism for impeachment hearings and that
this should be the future reality, but to argue that the absence
of that best choice should mean that Parliament should be
overruled, is absolute pseudo-academic nonsense. Such advocacy
has been deliberately partisan -- and history should judge those
who made such moves to undermine the power of the people's
representative body, with fitting disdain.
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