States of Emergency - Centre for Policy Alternatives

Parliament has generally been ineffectual in holding the executive
to account for the exercise of emergency powers. The Supreme
Court also has been generally deferential to the executive,
although in the use of its fundamental rights and constitutional
jurisdiction it has a marginally better record largely due to the
efforts of some judges.
Democracy in Sri Lanka we know to be deeply Llawed. A relatively
long history of procedural democracy has been bedevilled by its
substantive practice, its promise distorted by patronage politics
and, more pertinently for this discussion, the ethnicisation of the
majoritarian principle. However, because the conception of
democracy of popular subscription is not based on the liberal
notion of a contractarian relationship between citizen and State,
but rather through the prisms of proximate relationships such as
ethnicity, 168 standards of democratic accountability are as a
matter of politics not exclusively those prescribed by liberal
democracy; i.e., governmental behaviour is not always judged by
reference to standards such as commitment to human rights and
Lidelity to the rule of law. Consequentially, public tolerance of
authoritarianism is high. Of course, this has had an adverse impact
on fundamental rights and the rule of law.
3.2.2
Communal
Alienation:
Us
vs.
Them
Reference was made earlier to the consensus‐generating character
of emergencies, that leads to greater acceptance of sweeping
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The ethnicisation of political languages of negotiation, the deLinition of
group interests, and the articulation of political claims is aggravated by
the infusion of distinctly ethnic‐nationalist and antagonistic forms of
political mobilisation. Political consensus on the value of liberty in the
context of crisis and emergency rule is therefore difLicult.
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