President Mahinda Rajapaksa sacked the country's Chief Justice over the weekend. This week, Mr. Rajapaksa installed one of his advisers in that post, and the fear is South Asia's newest strongman is now unstoppable.
Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake's main crime seems to have been to lock horns with the government. In October, the Supreme Court blocked legislation that would have awarded Basil Rajapaksa—the minister for economic development and the President's brother—sweeping powers to control development funds, on the grounds that some of these powers belonged to the provinces. Though Sri Lanka's parliament eventually passed an amended version of the bill, in November it also began impeachment proceedings against Mrs. Bandaranayake on 14 charges, mainly of financial misconduct. She says the charges are trumped up.
Meanwhile the International Commission of Jurists has condemned the appointment of a trusted aide of Sri Lanka's president as the country's chief justice and urged the government to reinstate the former top judge who was fired after a highly criticized impeachment process.
The group denounced the appointment of Mohan Peiris, a retired attorney general and a legal adviser to the Cabinet, as chief justice, saying it "raises serious concerns about the future of the rule of law and accountability" and is "a further assault on the independence of the judiciary."
Many prominent lawyers in Sri Lanka have already said they still recognize Bandaranayake as the chief justice and have written to senior judges urging them not to recognize a new appointee.
Bandaranayake said in a statement Tuesday that she was still the legitimate chief justice of Sri Lanka, but that she decided to leave her official residence and office, fearing violence.
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