Ranil wants report on public views by end-April

By Chamitha Kuruppu

Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe on Thursday requested the Public Representations Committee on Constitutional Reforms to submit its report before the end of April in order to decide whether or not the country needs a new constitution.

The committee has concluded receiving and gathering public views on the new constitution after visiting all 25 districts. The committee met the Prime Minister to brief him about their work.  

“We wanted to get everyone’s opinion when drafting the constitution. We wanted a much broader mechanism,” Premier Wickremesinghe told the committee members, adding that the Soulbury Committee gathered ideas by going around the country, with people coming before the Parliamentary Select Committee to give their viewpoints. However, he said the present Government went a step ahead and implemented a broader mechanism when receiving public views.      

“The resolution to convert the entire Parliament to a constitutional assembly was passed yesterday, now we need to go forward,” Wickremesinghe told the committee members.

The Premier added: “There is no draft from the Government. The draft will be based on two things; one is theatrical reforms. There was no broad consensus when we presented the 20th Amendment. We are now discussing electoral reforms with all political parties in order to get their consent. If they agree 50%, we need to increase the consensus to 70 or 80% or 100% on that.”

The Prime Minister assured that 100% of the ideas on drafting the new constitution would be taken from this report.  “We will take ideas about the electoral reforms from this report. Our decision will be based on this report,” Wickremesinghe said, meeting the committee members in Colombo.

He pointed out that the Government was planning to begin work by May. Therefore he will give time till April for the committee to submit the final report. “We are planning to begin work after the Sinhala Tamil New Year. “We hope that we will be able to get this report by 30 April because we need to find out whether we can draft a constitution or not,” he said.

“We met the Prime Minister today to brief him about the progress of the public hearing. He wanted us to submit our report soon. We informed him we will be able to submit it by the end of April. We have heard from more than 5,000 people, visiting all 25 districts of the country,” Lala Wijenayake, Chairman of the commission, told the Daily FT.

Wijenayake said the Prime Minister said that he would wait for the commission report but asked to submit people’s recommendations on the electoral reforms first.