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The renowned lawyer and constitutional expert was an ardent defender of civil liberties throughout his life and is best known in political circles for being one of the foremost lawyers in the battle to preserve former Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s civic rights in 1980 during the J.R. Jayewardene presidency.
In 1992, Goonesekere represented then MP Mahinda Rajapaksa in the fundamental rights application against police officers who had confiscated his documents pertaining to disappearances and rights abuses in Sri Lanka at the Katunayake airport as he was on the way to the UN in Geneva.
Prominent legal activist and human rights attorney J.C. Weliamuna said he counted himself lucky to have had Goonesekere for his guru and mentor.
“I consider it an honour of a lifetime to have been one of his students,” Weliamuna told the Daily FT. “He was a teacher of teachers and many of his students went on to become Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges,” Weliamuna noted.
Weliamuna recalled that at one juncture, all but one of the judges of the Supreme Court had been Goonesekere’s students.
He added that in court, R.K.W. Goonesekere had been a man of noble presence, dignity and integrity. “He never had any self-interest and always promoted dissent - he practiced equality at home, in court and everywhere he went,” Weliamuna recalled.
The activist lawyer noted that he only wished that Goonsekere could have lived to see democratic principles he stood for being respected by clients he had represented in the past.
Announcing the top lawyer’s death, the Law and Society Trust said Goonesekere’s ‘kind voice of guidance and gentle counsel will be missed by all those who worked with him’.
Goonesekere taught at the Department of Law, University of Peradeniya for 20 years. He taught law in Nigeria for several years and also served as principal of Sri Lanka Law College for a period of eight years from 1966-1974, hailed as the institution’s golden era.
He served as Chancellor of the Peradeniya University for the period of six years. Together with other legal luminaries like the late H.L. De Silva, Goonesekere had been part of the first intake of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ceylon in 1947.
The eminent Sri Lankan jurist also served as a member of the UN Working Committee on Discrimination during his career.
R.K.W. Goonesekera headed the Committee to Advise on the Reform of Laws Affecting Media Freedom and Freedom in 1996, which is hailed the genesis of media reform initiatives in Sri Lanka (Pinto-Jayewardene & Gunethilleke 2012). The RKW Committee Report examined virtually every aspect of the media and presented a host of recommendations, which established the foundation for reform efforts to follow.
The advocate of the Supreme Court was also president of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka from 1991-1993.
Goonesekere was awarded the title Deshamanya in 1998.
The cremation will take place at 4 p.m. on Wednesday (19), at the Jawatte Cemetery.
