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By Dharisha Bastians in Geneva
As State actors in Sri Lanka grow jittery about putting a new constitution to the popular test, ruling party parliamentarian Dr. Jayampathy Wickremaratne, who is a key architect of the draft, assured member countries, rights activists and diaspora groups in Geneva on Wednesday (1) that a constitutional referendum was very much on the cards.
Talks on the new constitution had stalled earlier this year but had since restarted and the constitutional process was on track again, Dr. Wickremaratne told participants at a discussion organised by the Sri Lankan Government on the sidelines of the 34th Session of UN Human Rights Council.
“We will have a referendum and it will be held after a campaign,” the Government MP vowed.
Dr. Wickremaratne told participants at Wednesday’s side event at the Palais des Nations that the Sri Lankan referendum on a new constitution will be different from referendums held in Columbia and Britain.
“Unlike the referendum in Columbia and elsewhere, the referendum on the new constitution for Sri Lanka will only be held after Parliament approves the draft by a two-thirds majority. So when the referendum is held it will be with the backing of a big parliamentary majority and political consensus on the draft,” the senior lawyer explained.
Deadlocked talks on the new constitution had resumed on 21 February, the senior lawyer said. The discussions were currently dual-tracked, he added, with the President launching tri-partite discussions between the two main parties and the Tamil National Alliance in late January.
President Maithripala Sirisena and other senior members of the National Unity Government have grown increasingly concerned about putting a new constitution to the electoral test later this year, after referendums held in Britain, Italy and Columbia went against incumbent governments, authoritative sources told Daily FT in Colombo last month. President Sirisena wants Government and Opposition members to convince him that a referendum on the new constitution can be won, Daily FT learns.
Once the constitutional draft is finalised and passed by a super majority in Parliament, the Government is expected to launch a massive propaganda campaign to win support for the new constitution.
“With the right campaign, I believe the referendum can be won,” Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera told Colombo-based foreign correspondents last month.
Dr. Wickremaratne, who joined the Government delegation to the UNHRC in Geneva this week, told Daily FT that talks at the Steering Committee, the 21-member body setup by the Constitutional Assembly and chaired by the Prime Minister, had also resumed and progressing steadily. The Committee was in the process of finalising its interim report, Dr. Wickremaratne explained. “Talks at the Steering Committee went very well on 21 February. The SLFP was also remarkably cooperative,” he said.
The SLFP, which voted for the resolution of Parliament setting up a Constitutional Assembly to draft a new constitution, has been publicly backtracking lately, insisting that the party is only agreeable to constitutional reform, rather than all out replacement. Public statements by members of the SLFP threw the entire constitutional drafting process into doubt. The process resumed after the first round of tri-partite talks chaired by the President.
Highly-placed Government sources told Daily FT that Indian Foreign Secretary Dr. S. Jaishankar, who held high level talks in Colombo in late February, had also delivered tough messages to top Government actors, on the importance of seizing the present opportunity to enact a new constitution that would address the root causes of the island’s ethnic conflict.
Similar messages were delivered to the TNA, including rebellious factions of the alliance of Tamil parties, the sources said. These diplomatic messages could also have contributed to the resumption of the stalled process, and convinced the SLFP to cooperate for the moment, the sources added.
