States of Emergency - Centre for Policy Alternatives

such as the Human Rights Committee, the European Court of
Human Rights, and the Inter‐American Commission and Court.
Juxtaposed with the Sri Lankan legal framework and political
experience of states of emergency, the international legal
regulation of human rights and emergency powers (understood as
a model of accommodation) opens up several avenues of
investigation, which can be summarised as follows: (a) the
applicability of international human rights law within the
domestic jurisdiction in the context of the dualist tradition; (b) the
dependence of international human rights law for enforcement, in
spite of treaty mandated legal mechanisms, on moral suasion and
political pressure, and indeed, the responsiveness of national
courts in the context of competing fundamental principles such as
State sovereignty; (c) the gap between law and practice in the Sri
Lankan experience raises concerns about its categorisation as a
model of accommodation; and as result (d) raises the possibility
that the rule of law does not extend to the state of exception,
which quite apart from the chilling implications for liberty and
democracy, at least indicates that the Schmittian challenge to
liberal constitutionalist frames of analysis has purchase in the Sri
Lankan context. Many of the issues in relation to (a) and (b) above
have been raised by the Supreme Court decision in the Singarasa
Case
 and will be discussed in some detail later. We have made
reference to the more political issues raised by (c) and (d) in the
previous chapters and they will again be addressed in the
discussion on the Sri Lankan experience in Part II.
With these preliminary observations, we may now proceed to
provide a general overview of the issues relating to states of
emergency, fundamental rights and derogations in the ‘legislative’
framework of international human rights law, and the general
themes that emerge from the jurisprudence of treaty bodies
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