Law, morality, and re-founding of the republic - Part 2

THIS second part of “No Kings” turns from the social to the institutional, tracing how Sri Lanka’s republican ideal has been hollowed out by judicial compromise, constitutional distortion, and selective enforcement. It revisits the 1988 Fourteenth Amendment and the inertia of the 2023 Anti-Corruption Act to show how law has become theatre while impunity endures. Drawing on Eliot Cohen’s idea of political gravity and David Brooks's call for moral mobilisation, it argues that reform must join moral clarity, civic organisation, and programmatic precision. The essay concludes with a call for a People’s Constitution — abolishing the Executive Presidency, restoring parliamentary primacy, and re-anchoring the Republic in Cicero’s ideal: law above rulers, not rulers above law.

- By Dr. Jayalath Bandara Adikarige

The remedy lies in a People's Constitution abolishing the Executive Presidency and restoring parliamentary primacy under a prime minister answerable to the legislature

In the first part of this series, I argued that Sri Lanka’s political and economic life now bends under a Newtonian-Ciceronian gravity: promises betrayed generate an equal and opposite reaction. This second part turns from the social to the institutional — from public frustration to the structures that sustain it— asking how law became a captive of appetite and what a republican restoration might require.

4. Rule-of-law stress points

The Mt. Lavinia Magistrate’s Court incident crystallised a wider anxiety: that justice is unequal and disciplinary power selective. When citizens see some actors above consequence while others are humiliated by procedure, they mobilise not only against policy but on behalf of principle.

One of the greatest betrayals of the covenants of the executive, Parliament, and judiciary towards the people of Sri Lanka occurred in 1988, and the disjunction between law and practice is nowhere clearer than in the afterlife of the Fourteenth Amendment enacted that year. Article 99A, inserted under executive pressure, allowed defeated or non-contesting candidates to enter Parliament by party nomination — a direct violation of republican equality and the people’s franchise. The Supreme Court, instead of defending the constitutional principle that sovereignty is nontransferable, sanctioned the distortion. That single judicial compromise hollowed out the representative basis of the Republic. More than three decades on, the pattern endures: in the 2024 elections, the AKD administration appointed two defeated candidates to Parliament under the same defective provision while proclaiming a crusade for the rule of law.