An activist in Colombia, the deadliest country in the world for human rights defenders in 2022, accounting for 186 killings – or 46% – of the global total registered last year. Credit: Sebastian Barros
By Bibbi Abruzzini and Clarisse Sih, Forus BRUSSELS, Apr 27 2023 (IPS)
In today’s world, human rights defenders face immense challenges, with threats, attacks, and repression being rampant in many countries. According to the latest report by Front Line Defenders, killings of rights defenders increased in 2022, with a total of 401 deaths across 26 different countries. Despite the adoption of the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders 25 years ago, the threats faced by defenders persist globally.
One striking example of the dire situation is in Bolivia, where violations of freedoms of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and the right to defend rights have been recorded by the Observatory of Rights Defenders of UNITAS, with the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights of Bolivia (APDHB) being a longstanding victim of attacks and delegitimization. A total of 725 violations of the freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, democratic institutions and the right to defend rights have been recorded by the Observatory of Rights Defenders.
Gladys Sandova, a human rights and environmental defender in the Tariquía Flora and Fauna National Reserve in Bolivia, reveals how the state often aligns with oil businesses instead of protecting communities. “Tariquía is the lung of Tarija,” Gladys explains, yet this vital source of water for southern Bolivia and home to over 3,000 people, is at risk due to the state-owned Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) seeking to revive oil exploration in the reserve.
“Oil companies are here, we are going to lose our natural richness, they are going to affect the lives of families, and contaminate our water and our air,” says Gladys, reflecting the urgent need to defend human rights and the environment.
Stories from human rights defenders from across the globe are also featured in the #AlternativeNarratives campaign, which seeks to amplify the voices of civil society organizations and grassroots movements that work towards social justice, human rights, and sustainable development. The campaign encourages the use of storytelling, multimedia tools, and creative expression to highlight alternative perspectives, challenge stereotypes, and advocate for positive chang while fostering a more inclusive and equitable narrative space that reflects the diversity of human experiences and promotes solidarity, empathy, and mutual understanding.
Human rights defenders, including women defenders, continue to mobilize against repressive regimes and occupying forces in countries like Afghanistan, the DRC, El Salvador, Iran, Myanmar, Sudan, and Ukraine. Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, highlights the underreporting of human rights violations against defenders, particularly women, and outlines “disturbing trends” in relation to civic space worldwide.
Repongac, representing over 1,200 NGOs in Central Africa, states that “human rights in Central Africa are no longer guaranteed,” with civil society actors, journalists, and defenders facing repression, prosecution, and arrests. Recent campaigns organized by Repongac in Central Africa and Repaoc in West Africa, supported by Forus and the French Development Agency, brought together diverse stakeholders, including human rights defenders, political parties, parliamentarians, journalists, and security personnel, to initiate a dialogue and protect civic space amnd fundametnal freedoms in the region.
To support activists and defenders globally, the Danish Institute for Human Rights has launched a monitoring tool that assesses whether an enabling environment for human rights defenders exists across five critical areas. Developed in collaboration with 24 institutions and organizations, including the United Nations and civil society networks, the tool not only tracks the number of killings of human rights defenders but also analyzes the presence of appropriate legislation and practices to protect defenders.
As Carol Rask, a representative of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, explains, defending human rights is a crime in some countries and a deadly activity in others. It is a call to action for change, urging individuals, organizations, and governments to prioritize and protect the crucial work of human rights defenders worldwide.
Griselda Sillerico, human rights defender in Bolivia for over 30 years, quotes Ana María Romero and says “human rights are seeds that we continue to plant and that over the years we harvest.” Griselda Sillerico’s quote echoes the enduring spirit of human rights advocacy, where the work of human rights defenders like her is a constant effort to sow the seeds of justice, equality, and dignity for all. Despite the challenges and setbacks, human rights defenders across the world continue to plant these seeds, often at great personal risk, with the hope of reaping a future where human rights are universally respected and protected.
Matiullah Wesa worked with community and tribal leaders in remote areas in Afghanistan to advocate for education and bring learning closer to communities.
By David Kode JOHANNESBURG, Apr 19 2023 (IPS)
Matiullah Wesa’s crime was to try to ensure young people got an education in Afghanistan. His recent forceful abduction by the Taliban offers the latest stark reminder that global solidarity and coherent action from the international community are needed to prevent the complete loss of the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.
Matiullah has been at the forefront of advocating for access to education as a co-founder and leader of Pen Path. For more than a decade, Pen Path has worked with community and tribal leaders in remote areas in Afghanistan to advocate for education and bring learning closer to communities. It works to enlighten communities about the importance of education, particularly girl’s and women’s education, organises book donations, runs mobile libraries in remote areas and reopens schools closed by years of conflict and insecurity. Pen Path has reopened over 100 schools, distributed more than 1.5 million items of stationery and provided education facilities for 110,000 children – 66,000 of them girls. This is what Matiullah is being punished for.
The abduction of Matiullah and many others advocating for the rights of education point to a concerted effort by the Taliban to try to restrict women’s and girls’ access to education and silence those advocating for education and an inclusive society.
There are sadly many other instances. In November 2022 around 60 Taliban members stormed a press conference organised to announce the formation of Afghan Women Movement for Equality. They arrested conference participants and deleted all images from their phones.
Immediately after taking power in August 2021, the Taliban instructed women to stay at home and avoid travelling. In December 2022, the Ministry of Higher Education announced it had suspended university education for women until further notice. Taliban officials argued that female students did not wear proper clothing on campus and announced it was enforcing gender segregation in schools. These decisions have been accompanied by others that force thousands of female workers to stay at home and prevent women and girls entering public spaces such as parks.
In December 2022 the Taliban banned women from working for international and national civil society organisations. This was a move that could only be counter-productive, since women play a vital role in providing essential services that people need. Banning women from working for civil society organisations affects millions in dire need of humanitarian assistance and services to women and children, as well as further increasing unemployment. The Taliban urged organisations to suspend female staff under the pretence that workers did not adhere to the regime’s strict dress code.
Most recently, women have been banned from working for United Nations agencies that are operating in Afghanistan. The United Nations may have to pull out.
It has taken just months for the Taliban to reverse the gains made over the years before their return that saw Afghan women claim visibility in public life and work such roles as broadcasters, doctors and judges.
Women in Afghanistan are fighting but can’t succeed alone
These restrictions on women’s rights should be seen in the context of the closing of civic space and attacks on other fundamental rights. As a result, Afghanistan’s civic space rating was recently downgraded to closed, the worst category, by the CIVICUS Monitor, a research partnership that tracks civic space conditions in 197 countries.
Despite the ongoing restrictions against women, the brave women of Afghanistan refuse to back down. They continue to organise what protests they can against restrictions and women human rights defenders continue to advocate for the rights of all women and girls to access education and participate in decision-making processes.
When women protest against restrictions, they risk harassment, physical and psychological torture and detentions. Some have been forcefully abducted from their homes. In January 2022, Taliban gunmen raided the homes of women human rights defenders Parwana Ibrahimkhel and Tamana Zaryab and abducted them.
No society can reach its real potential without the participation of women. The international community must double its efforts to support women and girls in Afghanistan. States should respond proactively to the United Nations 2023 appeal for Afghanistan. Aid should however be made conditional on guarantees to uphold the fundamental rights of women and girls. The international community should accompany aid with a strategy to build a more inclusive and open society.
Not to do so would be to abandon the likes of Matiullah Wesa, the many others like him penalised for standing up for education and rights, and the women of girls of Afghanistan being forced into silence.
David Kode is the Advocacy and Campaigns Lead at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance.
Last October, Ales Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was one of three winners, alongside two human rights organisations: Memorial, in Russia, and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. The Nobel Committee recognised the three’s ‘outstanding effort to document war crimes, human rights abuses and the abuse of power’.
But Bialiatski couldn’t travel to Oslo to collect his award. He’d been detained in July 2021 and held in jail since. This month he was found guilty on trumped-up charges of financing political protests and smuggling, and handed a 10-year sentence. His three co-defendants were also given long jail terms. There are many others besides them who’ve been thrown in prison, among them other staff and associates of Viasna, the human rights centre Bialiatski heads.
Crackdown follows stolen election
The origins of the current crackdown lie in the 2020 presidential election. Dictator Alexander Lukashenko has held power since 1994, but in 2020 for once a credible challenger slipped through the net to stand against him. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya ran against Lukashenko after her husband, democracy activist Sergei Tikhanovsky, was arrested and prevented from doing so. Her independent, female-fronted campaign caught the public’s imagination, offering the promise of change and uniting many voters.
Lukashenko’s response to this rare threat was to arrest several members of Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign staff, along with multiple opposition candidates and journalists, introduce additional protest restrictions and restrict the internet. When all of that didn’t deter many from voting against him, he blatantly rigged the results.
This bare-faced act of fraud triggered a wave of protests on a scale never seen under Lukashenko. At the peak in August 2020, hundreds of thousands took to the streets. It took a long time for systematic state violence and detentions to wear the protests down.
Everything Lukashenko has done since is to suppress the democracy movement. Hundreds of civil society organisations have been forcibly liquidated or shut themselves down in the face of harassment and threats. Independent media outlets have been labelled as extremist, subjected to raids and effectively banned.
Lukashenko’s repression is enabled by an alliance with an even bigger pariah: Vladimir Putin. When the European Union and democratic states applied sanctions in response to Lukashenko’s crackdown, Putin provided a loan that was crucial in helping him ride out the storm.
This marked a break in a long strategy of Lukashenko carefully balancing between Russia and the west. The effect was to bind the two rogue leaders together. That’s continued during Russia’s war on Ukraine. When the invasion started, some of the Russian troops that entered Ukraine did so from Belarus, where they’d been staging so-called military drills in the days before. Belarus-based Russian missile launchers have also been deployed.
Just days after the start of Russia’s invasion, Lukashenko pushed through constitutional changes, sanctioned through a rubber-stamp referendum. Among the changes, the ban on Belarus hosting nuclear weapons was removed.
Belarussian soldiers haven’t however been directly involved in combat so far. Putin would like them to be, if only because his forces have sustained much higher-than-expected losses and measures to fill gaps, such as the partial mobilisation of reservists last September, are domestically unpopular. Lukashenko has struck a balance between belligerent talk and moderate action, insisting Belarus will only join the war if Ukraine attacks it.
That may be because Belarus’s enabling of Russia’s aggression has made people only more dissatisfied with Lukashenko. Many Belarussians want no involvement in someone else’s war. Several protests took place in Belarus at the start of the invasion, leading to predictable repression similar to that seen in Russia, with numerous arrests.
Crucially, Belarus’s security forces stuck by Lukashenko at the peak of protests; if they’d defected, the story could have been different. Full involvement in the war would likely see even Lukashenko loyalists turn against him, including in the military. Soldiers might refuse to fight. It would be a dangerous step to take. As Russia’s war drags on, Lukashenko could find himself walking an increasingly difficult tightrope.
Two countries, one struggle
It’s perhaps with this in mind that Lukashenko’s latest repressive move has been to extend the death penalty. State officials and military personnel can now be executed for high treason. This gives Lukashenko a gruesome new tool to punish and deter defections.
As well as worrying about their safety, Belarus’s activists – in exile or in jail – face the challenge of ensuring the cause of Belarussian democracy isn’t lost in the fog of war. They need continuing solidarity and support to make the world understand that their struggle against oppression is part of the same campaign for liberty being waged by Ukrainians, and that any path to peace in the region must also mean democracy in Belarus.
By Inés M. Pousadela MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Feb 22 2023 (IPS)
On 9 February, Nicaragua’s dictator, Daniel Ortega, unexpectedly ordered the release of 222 political prisoners, including several former presidential candidates, opposition party leaders, journalists, priests, diplomats, businesspeople and former government supporters branded as enemies for expressing mild public criticism.
Also released were several members and leaders of civil society organisations (CSOs) and social movements, including student activists and environmental, peasant and Indigenous rights defenders. Some had been arrested on trumped-up charges for taking part in mass protests in 2018 and stuck in prison for more than four years.
But the Ortega regime didn’t simply let them go – it put them on a charter flight to the USA and before their plane had even landed permanently stripped them of their Nicaraguan nationality and their civil and political rights. The government made clear it wasn’t recognising their innocence; it was only commuting their sentences.
The rise of a police state
Ever since being re-elected in a blatantly fraudulent election in November 2021, Ortega has sought to make up for his lack of democratic legitimacy by establishing a police state. The regime effectively outlawed all civil society and independent media, closing more than 3,000 CSOs and 55 media outlets. It subverted the judicial system to falsely accuse, convict and imprison hundreds of critics and intimidate everyone else into compliance.
Political prisoners have been treated with purposeful cruelty, as though they’re enemy hostages – kept in isolation, either in the dark or under permanent bright lighting, given insufficient food and refused medical care, subjected to constant interrogations, denied legal counsel and allowed only irregular visits by family members, if at all. Psychological torture has been a constant, and many have been also subjected to physical torture.
The release of some prisoners hasn’t signalled any improvement in conditions or move towards democracy, as made clear by the treatment experienced by one political prisoner, Catholic bishop Rolando Álvarez, who refused to board the plane to the USA.
In retaliation for his refusal to leave the country, his trial date was brought forward and held immediately, in the absence of any procedural safeguards. It predictably resulted in a 26-year sentence. Álvarez was immediately sent to prison, where he remains alongside dozens of others.
Stripped of citizenship
The constitutional amendment stripping the 222 released political prisoners of their citizenship states that ‘traitors to the homeland shall lose the status of Nicaraguan nationals’ – even though the constitution establishes that no national can be deprived of their nationality.
It was an illegal act on top of another illegal act. No one can be deported from their own country: what the regime called a deportation was a banishment, something against both domestic law and international human rights standards.
On 15 February, the regime doubled down: it stripped 94 more people of their nationality. Those newly declared stateless included prominent political dissidents, civil society activists, journalists and the writers Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez, both of whom had held government positions in the 1980s. Most of the 94 were already living in exile. They were declared ‘fugitives from justice’.
Mixed reactions
By rendering 326 people stateless, the Nicaraguan dictatorship fuelled instant international solidarity. On 10 February, the Spanish government offered the 222 just-released prisoners Spanish citizenship – an offer many are bound to accept. On 17 February, more than 500 writers around the world rallied around Belli and Ramírez and denounced the closure of civic space in Nicaragua.
But Argentina, alongside most of Latin America, has looked the other way. Its silence suggests that democratic consensus across the region is more fragile and superficial than might be hoped, with willingness to condemn rights violations depending on the ideological leanings of those who carry them out.
Currently all the region’s big democracies – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico – have governments that define themselves as left-wing. But only one of their presidents, Chile’s Gabriel Boric, has consistently criticised Nicaragua’s authoritarian turn. In response to the latest developments he tweeted a personal message of solidarity with those affected, calling Ortega a dictator. The rest have either issued mild official statements or simply remained silent.
Now what?
The Nicaraguan government insisted that releasing the prisoners was its own decision. The fact it was accompanied by further violations of released prisoners’ rights was meant as a demonstration of power.
But the move looks like it was made in the expectation of receiving something in return. The Nicaraguan government has long demanded that US sanctions be lifted; at a time when one of its closest ideological allies, Russia, is unable to provide any significant support, Nicaragua needs the USA more than ever. But the US government has always said the release of political prisoners must be the first step towards negotiations.
Given this, the unilateral surrender of people it considers dangerous conspirators to the state it proclaims is its worst enemy doesn’t seem much like a show of force. And if it isn’t, then it’s a valuable advocacy opportunity. The international community must push for the restoration of civic space and the return of free, fair and competitive elections. The first step should be to support the hundreds who’ve been expelled from their own country, as the future builders of democracy in Nicaragua.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Feb 16 2023 (IPS) – In late January, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, finished an official visit to Venezuela. He said he’d found a fragmented society in great need of bridging its divides and encouraged the government to take the lead in listening to civil society concerns and responding to victims of rights violations.
But Venezuelan civil society had hoped for more. Two days before his arrival, the National Assembly, Venezuela’s congress, had approved the first reading of a law aimed at further restricting and criminalising civil society work. International civil society urged the High Commissioner to call for the bill to be shelved. Many found the UN’s response disappointing.
Another turn of the screw
The bill imposes further restrictions on civil society organisations (CSOs). If it becomes law, CSOs will have to hand over lists of members, staff, assets and donors. They’ll be obliged to provide detailed data about their activities, funding sources and use of financial resources – the kind of information that has already been used to persecute and criminalise CSOs and activists. Similar legislation has been used in Nicaragua to shut down hundreds of CSOs and arrest opposition leaders, journalists and human rights defenders.
The law will ban CSOs from conducting ‘political activities’, an expression that lacks clear definition. It could easily be interpreted as prohibiting human rights work and scrutiny of the government. There’s every chance the law will be used against human rights organisations that cooperate with international human rights mechanisms. This would endanger civil society’s efforts to document the human rights situation, which produces vital inputs for the UN’s human rights system and the International Criminal Court, which has an ongoing case against Venezuela.
The law-making process has been shrouded in secrecy: the draft bill wasn’t made publicly available and wasn’t discussed at the National Assembly before being approved. The initiative was immediately denounced as a tool to control, restrict and potentially shut down CSOs and criminally prosecute their leaders and staff. If implemented, it could mean the end of civil society as we know it in Venezuela.
The UN and Venezuela
The previous High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, visited Venezuela in September 2019. She was criticised for taking a cautious approach. Moreover, most of the commitments in the agreement the government signed with her were never fulfilled.
Following that visit, the UN Human Rights Council established the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (FFMV), tasked with investigating alleged human rights violations. In September 2022, the FFMV issued a report detailing the involvement of Venezuela’s intelligence agencies in repressing dissent, including by committing human rights violations such as torture and sexual violence.
But intimidation only grew as Türk’s visit approached, with some protest leaders put under surveillance, followed and detained.
Venezuelan CSOs called for a more energetic approach, but Türk followed his predecessor’s footsteps. His visit was characterised by secrecy and brevity, particularly in terms of the time dedicated to engaging with civil society.
Bachelet’s agreement with the government had included the presence of a two-person UN team to monitor the human rights situation and provide assistance and advice. This has now been extended for two years, but the details haven’t been made public.
Civil society activists have continued to work closely with the UN field office and wouldn’t want to risk its presence in the country, so to some extent they understand Türk’s caution in dealing with the Venezuelan government. But they also view his visit as a missed opportunity.
Türk’s statement to the media at the end of his visit was very much focused on the political and economic crises and healing divisions in society, with human rights ‘challenges’ occupying third place on his list of major concerns.
Alerta Venezuela, a Colombia-based human rights group, recognised the references Türk made to ‘new issues’ – such as the need for Venezuela to sign the Escazú Agreement on environmental rights and decriminalise abortion – alongside ongoing human rights violations such as extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests and torture. But it criticised crucial omissions and the UN’s apparent willingness to take government data at face value.
On the anti-NGO bill, the High Commissioner said he’d asked the government to take into account his comments but didn’t provide any information about their content, so it isn’t clear whether he advocated for amendments to a law that can only remain deeply flawed or for it to be shelved – which is what civil society wanted him to do.
The Venezuelan government has all along paid only lip service to cooperation with the UN and hasn’t kept its promises. Repression is only going to intensify in the run-up to the presidential election scheduled for 2024. Any strategy that involves trusting the government and hoping it will change its position seems doomed to failure.
High-level human rights advocacy needed
More energetic criticism came from the independent and less politically constrained FFMV, which expressed ‘deep concerns’ about the potential implications of the draft NGO law for civic and democratic space.
That is the stance civil society would like the High Commissioner for Human Rights to have taken. They want the office holder to be a human rights champion standing independent of states and unafraid of causing a stir.
Türk is only five months into his four-year term. Civil society will keep doing its best to engage, in the hope that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights can become the human rights advocate the world – and Venezuela – need.
Food insecurity in Sri Lanka has increased dramatically due to two consecutive seasons of poor harvests, foreign exchange shortages, and reduced household purchasing power. Amidst Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since independence, the UN revised its joint Humanitarian Needs and Priorities (HNP) Plan, appealing for more life-saving assistance to aid 3.4 million people. November 2022 Credit: UNICEF/Chameera Laknath
LONDON, Feb 3 2023 (IPS) – On February 4, Sri Lanka commemorates 75 years of Independence. But it will not be the extravaganza of the past years, the minaturised imitations of the grand displays on Moscow’s Red Square or China’s Tiananmen Square.
Still, a critical question has been reverberating in the community ever since the government announced a scaled down celebration to commemorate 75 years since Britain relinquished power in 1948.
After defaulting on the country’s debt servicing last April for the first time in its post-independence history and being forced to resort to massive printing of money to meet state expenditure, does Sri Lanka need to celebrate independence day this year however downsized it would be?
Particularly so, when President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s government itself claims Sri Lanka is struggling economically and it would take years to recover from its current chaos created by leaders who inexorably pushed it to the tip of the abyss with stupid economic policies, wasteful expenditure and wide- scale corruption and fraud.
While imposing unbearable new taxes and other restrictions on the daily lives of the people, driving them further into penury with school children going without meals, fainting in their classrooms and in need of medical treatment which itself is becoming scarce, the country’s leaders don’t seem short of resources for celebrations.
Even the country’s diplomatic missions will be holding their annual independence day celebrations as the invitation I received indicated, feasting their countrymen as best as they could.
Yet over the last couple of months the government has been selling the story that it has no funds to pay for the Local Government elections due in March. A strange enough claim after President Ranil Wickremesinghe, in one of his other roles as finance minister, presenting the budget for 2023 last November allocated funds for the election and parliament, which oversees public expenditure, approved it.
Now, the very persons who allocated money just three months ago claim to lack funds for a constitutionally required election. Punning on the old Harry Belafonte calypso, there is a hole in the budget, said some wag on social media.
It is this contradiction in government conduct that an already enraged people find inexcusable. Having got rid of one elected president– Gotabaya Rajapaksa– who surreptitiously fled the country last July when mounting peoples’ protests demanded the Rajapaksa clan quit the government, they find themselves confronted with what Sri Lankans have come to see as a Rajapaksa clone– and now derisively call him Ranil Rajapaksa– thrust into the presidency to keep the family’s political fires alight.
The Roman poet Juvenal dismissively called the delusionary performances staged by the Roman emperors of the time to distract their discontented citizenry, “panem et circensus”- bread and circuses.
Bread, like some other essentials, might be scarce or priced beyond the reach of many of its 22 million people. A few months back, the UN agency UNICEF reported that 5.7 million Sri Lankans including 2.3 million children, are in need of humanitarian assistance and the numbers are likely to rise in the coming days.
But the country’s leaders are not beyond performing their own circus acts. A few days back President Wickremesinghe appointed two more cabinet ministers bringing the total to 22.
Within hours Sri Lankans with their innate sense of humour were on social media branding the new cabinet “Ali Baba and the 22” with the doors to the cabinet still open for more acolytes chosen not for integrity and competence but loyalty.
Before the two new ministers fattened the cabinet, splicing off the portfolios of two existing ministers, President Wickremesinghe a couple of months ago appointed 37 state ministers leaving room for three more.
Sri Lanka’s bloated ministerial ranks would surely be one of the largest in today’s parliamentary democracies. Not only is it large in numbers but the perks offered to ministers and state ministers is stunningly staggering–salaries, free housing, several expensive vehicles with fuel, free utilities such as electricity, water, telephones up to a point, several personal staff with paid salaries, armed personal security with escort vehicles, a special allowance for each day they attend parliament, state pension after five years and other facilities not generally known.
While the government is prepared to splash state funds on bolstering party cadres and lickspittle who have creamed off state assets, in the last couple of months it has been using every ruse in the books-and some which are not in them- trying to deprive the people of their constitutional right to the franchise, by blocking the Local Government elections due shortly.
This election, last held in 2018, is for 340 municipal councils, urban councils and village bodies is scheduled for March 9—the date set by the independent Election Commission last month.
But as the day for the election, as constitutionally required, neared, the attempts to stymie it began with grandees of President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) and the Rajapaksa clan-run Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) that is propping up Wickremesinghe with its parliamentary majority, asserting that economic recovery must precede elections.
Ministers and even state officials were trotting out excuses that there was no money to fund elections, expecting the populace to have forgotten the budgetary allocation passed by parliament a few months back.
As this was being written, internationally-known legal academic and former foreign minister Prof GL Peiris was telling the media the government had made seven attempts to try and stop the election including an affidavit to the Supreme Court filed by the secretary to the finance ministry claiming the state of the economy precluded holding elections right now.
The latest ruse was a law called the Election Expenses Bill to control spending for elections hurriedly passed by parliament. If, as Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapaksa said, this proposal has been hanging fire for years, why the rush now, the opposition and anxious voters asked.
Like the opposition, the public too smelled a rotten rat. It was seen as another attempt to derail the elections by calling for the provisions of the bill be incorporated which would call for more time.
Despite all the public bravura, both the Rajapaksa-controlled SLPP and Wickremesinghe-led UNP which was swept into oblivion at the 2020 general elections, fear that given the mood of the country which rose in mass protests for some seven months last year leading to the resignation of President Rajapaksa and three of his brothers from the cabinet, they would suffer ignominious defeat.
Especially so the UNP which lost every single seat including that of party leader Wickremesinghe who managed to creep back into parliament one year later through a clause in the electoral law.
Not only would a poor electoral performance by the SLPP and UNP which have now joined hands make governance difficult and troublesome, it would also strengthen public opposition both to the Rajapaksas and President Wickremesinghe who many argue-and rightly so-as a leader rejected by the country two years ago and lacking a popular mandate to rule the country.
So what one sees now is a symbiotic relationship between the executive headed by Wickremesinghe and the legislature controlled by the Rajapaksas, running the country and using outdated laws- some dating back to British times- to beat back public dissent, employing the security forces to trample on the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of the people- free speech and expression, of association and assembly and peaceful protest.
It also raises issues about the independence of the Attorney-General and some of the independent institutions set up under the constitution which are believed to have come under pressure during the Wickremesinghe presidency.
With two arms of the state- the executive and legislature under the control of the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa- led cabal and backed by the security forces as recent event have shown, Sri Lanka’s increasingly beleaguered populace can only rely for justice on the third arm of the state- an independent judiciary.
Over the years the judiciary has, now and then, been under pressure from dictatorial leaders who have not been averse to tamper with justice and the judicial process, sometimes denying impartial, independent judges their rightful place as chief justice or appointing friends or those amenable to the judiciary.
But two recent judgements by the Supreme Court have resurrected public faith that the judiciary could be relied on to safeguard the constitution and the peoples’ constitutional and human rights against state abuse of the law and the battering and brutality by the security forces.
A few months back the government tried to push through a “Bureau of Rehabilitation Bill” ostensibly to help treat and rehabilitate drug addicts and other drug users. Under cover of that it hoped to incarcerate political dissidents, activists and others which state security would identify those they do not like as ‘trouble makers’.
So, it included among those to be included under the law “ex-combatants, members of violent groups, violent extremist person and any other person or group of persons”.
The Supreme Court saw through this as an attempt to round up any person the authorities considered a political nuisance and hold them without recourse to the law. The court struck down the clause.
Holding that the Bill as a whole violated the constitution, it said it could be acceptable if certain clauses were amended. One of the clauses it found repugnant was the one cited above which the court wanted deleted, leaving rehabilitation open only to drug dependent persons and those identified by law as in need of rehabilitation.
In mid-January the Supreme Court delivered a landmark verdict which held former president Maithripala Sirisena, secretary of the defence ministry, police chief and top- ranking intelligence officers, of dereliction of duty and “failure to act” when valid and clear intelligence was passed on by foreign sources of an impending terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists on churches on Easter Sunday in 2019.
Some 270 persons including foreigners were killed and several hundred wounded in these attacks on churches and Colombo hotels.
Since these were civil cases, President Sirisena was fined 100 million rupees and the others lesser amounts. Sirisena as a former president was no longer entitled to immunity, a lesson for other former and future presidents that they too are liable to civil and criminal action such as corruption and human rights violations once they cease to hold office.
These judicial judgments bring some hope to the people that the citadels of power are vulnerable and could be breached by a strong and upright judiciary, the only institution now left to protect and uphold the country’s democratic traditions and norms.
If the judiciary is badgered, the last resort is too bloody to contemplate.
Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London.
