CONTEMPTIBLE CHARACTERS!

Shouldn't those who are taking up the refrain that the Chief Justice’s position in this country is somehow diminished, due to the fact that there are ‘two Chief Justices’ (!!) or that there are some scurrilous charges made against the incumbent chief and therefore he allegedly stands disqualified, be charged for contempt of court?

On the other hand, the law enforcement authorities in this country are not hypocrites, the way some of the civil society and NGO denizens are on a regular basis. NGO charlatan Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu for instance, has for long been, under aegis of his organization Centre for Policy Alternatives, campaigning for codified contempt of court legislation in this country.

This is due to the fact that contempt legislation has hitherto been rather clumsy and cavalier even; judges were able to summon persons for alleged contempt and without so much as a show cause or a call for defence, summarily sentence persons to serve time behind bars for contempt of court.

This procedure was arbitrary and almost feudal in character. It was possibly due to the fact that court was thought to be invested with almost god-given divine powers, or at least that was the aura created.

But that would not do. Law should presuppose that everybody is innocent until proven guilty, and this applies to everyone including those who allegedly had the temerity to insult court and rub judicial officers on the wrong side.

This is why Paikiasothy’s organization called for codified law when it concerned matters of contempt, and this was a justified position, probably a result of diligent work and application by those who were involved in the area of legal research in this NGO.

But that didn’t stop these agenda driven NGO leadership from calling for contempt action with regard to anyone who dared go against their pre-conceived plan to thwart the Select Committee proceedings against former Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake. All the pious scholars who called for codified contempt laws and a codified legal regimen on contempt, were seen to be standing on barstools tub-thumping for the instant arrest of those who had dared say anything contrary to their own views on the recent impeachment!

When tables have turned a bit and there are others now calling for contempt action against these same people for public calumny against the new Chief Justice and for questioning his constitutionally derived authority, they have apparently decided to go back to the old refrain that contempt laws should be codified, and that nobody should be hauled up for contempt until that is done!

The less that is said about the level of hypocrisy in this position the better, but it bears mention that the Attorney General’s department for instance is not pursuing any contempt charges because the AG’s department at least covets the moral high ground compared to these Janus-faced NGO con artistes!

The department is willing to give ear to what these people’s research officers and other scholars of course have been saying for some time, which is that contempt is something that should not be applied arbitrarily, and in a vacuum, without reference to some kind of formalized legal regimen.

Paikiasothy and their ilk should thank their stars that they are not behind bars or in leg irons, under the circumstances! If they were proper people, they would have reported back to all interested parties in their donor countries that Sri Lanka is such a country where in spite of their challenging the legal system in the most unorthodox manner, they are taken to be of nuisance value and nothing more - - something that very probably would have not been the case if civil society persons of their sort in these donor countries were in contempt of court in a similar fashion.

Strange then that the more they have strained to say that this country somehow is characterized by authoritarian rule marked by an absence of rule of law, the more they are in practice privy to enjoying greater freedoms not obtainable in the countries they regularly bow scrape and kowtow to!