Urgent Bills, stupid!
June 14, 2013, 8:18 pmWe thought the government had bidden farewell to the undemocratic practice of presenting urgent bills to Parliament after heavy flak it drew over the so-called Expropriation Bill, which was rushed through the House as if there were no tomorrow. The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), which was the government’s answer to UNSG Ban Ki-moon’s advisory panel on Sri Lanka, has also frowned on urgent bills.
But, old habits die hard! The government apparently cannot get over that deplorable practice injurious to democracy. It has announced that it is planning to move an urgent Bill to strip provincial councils of their powers to merge.
Opinion is divided on the question of the amalgamation of provinces. The ardent proponents of devolution are all for it while others are bitterly averse to it on the grounds that it helps distort ethnic ratio in the Eastern Province, where no particular community has a clear majority. A permanent merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces will also lead to the latter being cut like a melon to carve out a Muslim majority area with noncontiguous parts under its jurisdiction. Moreover, a merged North-East will encompass the same land mass as the separate state that the LTTE failed to create through violence but others are trying to secure by other means. Therefore, the constitutional provision for the merger of provinces remains an extremely contentious issue which needs to be handled with care.
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has a better chance than all other parties of winning the Northern PC polls scheduled for September. The government seems to fear that the Northern Provincial Council to be elected will be a thorn in its flesh with all hostile external forces, especially the Tamil Nadu politicians using that provincial administration to render the North ungovernable to achieve their separatist ends.
Provincial councils in other parts of the country have puppet administrations controlled by the government. So, the likelihood of the northern provincial administration ending up putty in the hands of Jayalalithaa et al who have vowed to create Eelam in Sri Lanka cannot be ruled out. It was only the other day that the TNA-controlled Trinco Urban Council signed an MoU with the US Embassy in Colombo to set up an information centre in breach of protocol. Likewise, foreign powers may seek to have direct dealings with the Northern PC. The government’s biggest problem will be that the Northern PC will exercise all the powers that the 13th Amendment has vested in the provincial councils unlike its counterparts elsewhere, which are under the ruling party’s thumb.
Sri Lanka has defeated terrorism which plagued all ethnic communities for nearly thirty years, but the secessionist forces that propelled the LTTE have not gone away. They are very much out and around advancing their separatist agenda with the help of some foreign powers.
Whatever the government’s concerns and sensitivities may be, on no grounds could the moving of urgent Bills be justified. That obnoxious practice amounts to a travesty of justice and democracy. For, it forecloses pre-enactment judicial review of legislation. Our Constitution does not permit the post-enactment judicial review of laws and, therefore, the existing constitutional provision for urgent Bills is tantamount to a licence for politicians in power to make laws according to their whims and fancies. This kind of legislative cutting corners, we repeat, is detrimental to the country’s democratic wellbeing. This is something that the proponents of a new Constitution should take cognisance of. There must be enough room left for judicial review of laws even after they are passed; the judiciary alone has the expertise to determine the constitutionality or otherwise of legislation.