| by Basil Fernando
( November 16, 2012, Hong Kong, Sri
Lanka Guardian) In May 1993, a UN sponsored election was held in Cambodia to
elect a government. The country had faced a civil war after Pol Pot's
catastrophic revolution. At the time, a large part of the country was under the
State of Cambodia, of which Hun Sen was the head. His party was one of the two
leading parties that contested the election, the other being led by Prince
Ranariddh, the son of the former king, King Sihanouk. A day or two after the
election, while the ballots were still being counted, a rumour began to be
spread that Hun Sen’s party had lost the election (it was proved true when the
results were announced) and that now the loser, Hun Sen, would be publicly
executed.
That was how people understood the
result of losing an election and in Sri Lanka, at the moment, the attempted
impeachment of the Chief Justice is conveying many such surprising meanings.
One perception seems to be that it is
more or less like a beheading, and that the beheading will take place at the
parliament.
A beheading assumes that the issue of
guilt or innocence is no longer relevant. It is only the final ceremony that is
left to be carried out.
Perhaps what has given rise to that
perception is that an impeachment is assumed to be a political affair.
In political affairs, it is assumed that
what matters most is what the leader who can muster most votes really wants or
thinks. His supporters have only one function: that is to vote in the manner
that they are told to vote.
S.L. Gunarasekara, who was himself a
Member of Parliament once, writes this on how MPs vote now:
Vast numbers of
Members of Parliament "simply voted 'for' or 'against' according to the
decisions taken by the leadership of his/her party.......The 'bottom line' in
this regard is the most unpalatable fact that independent thought and the
expression of independent opinions by its Members are, to the leadership of any
Party, as taboo as pork is to a Muslim or a Jew. The harsh reality about our
political system is that 'thinking' is the exclusive preserve of the leadership
of the Party and that acting in consonance with such 'thinking' and the
decisions based on it is a mandatory obligation of all its Members and Members
of Parliament in particular of any Party."
Since voting in parliament is assumed to
be happening this way, it is natural to conclude that no thinking is expected
in the parliament regarding the impeachment. All that would happen is the
execution, the beheading.
However, such perception fails to take
into consideration the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) function, which is
in fact to decide on the issue of guilt innocence.
That raises the issue as to whether a
decision of guilt and innocence can be a political decision?
If the answer to that question is yes,
then it would follow that, as the members of party are expected to vote
according to what their party leader wants, the impeachment would involve no
process of judging, and therefore it would indeed be a beheading.
This simply means that someone other
than the leader of the party that moving the impeachment motion should be the
judge. The PSC cannot do that function for the reasons stated above.
Those who judge on the issue of guilt
and innocence have to be impartial and impartiality assumes freedom to make
decisions. It follows then that judging on guilt and innocence cannot be a
party political act.
This being so, it appears that the view
of the 'impeachment' of the Chief Justice as a synonym for beheading is correct
in the Sri Lankan circumstances.
