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Wednesday, 12 December 2012 01:25 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Dharisha Bastians
President Mahinda Rajapaksa will appoint an independent panel to review the Parliamentary Select Committee report on the impeachment charges against Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake, as opposition to the fiasco gathers more steam.
President Rajapaksa, speaking at the inauguration of a new building for the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka (CA Sri Lanka) at Malalasekera Mawatha yesterday said he was not mandated by law to appoint an independent panel to perform the review, but was doing so to assuage his own conscience.
“I am also a lawyer. I do not like to see the judicial system undermined. I am ultimately accountable only to my conscience. This situation 
is saddening me,” the President said, in reference to the furore created by the process adopted to impeach the country’s senior-most judge.
The PSC on Saturday submitted its report to Parliament and the Committee, which finally comprised only Government members. It found the Chief Justice guilty on three charges levelled against her and exonerated her on two. Only five of the 14 charges levelled in the motion of impeachment were taken up for inquiry by the PSC.
The report came less than 36 hours after Chief Justice Bandaranayake and her lawyers walked out of the Committee citing a lack of faith in the process and less than 12 hours after the four Opposition MPs on the committee quit in protest at the unjustness of the proceedings and the derogatory treatment allegedly meted out to the Head of the country’s Judiciary by Government members on the PSC.
“If someone has made a mistake, those mistakes don’t need to be dragged out into the public,” the President said, adding that he would appoint an independent committee to review the PSC’s decisions before the report is implemented.
According to the President, 117 MPs signed the impeachment and showed the motion to him, but he was not in favour of going ahead with the process. “But we have a Parliament. And Parliament has decided that the PSC must submit a report,” he said. “Ultimately, I must be able to work according to my conscience and for that reason, even though I am not legally mandated to do so, I will appoint a panel to go into this,” the President said.
Pressure is mounting on the Government against the impeachment process, with courts around the country poised to come to a standstill tomorrow to decry the fact that the Chief Justice was not granted a fair trial. Lawyers and judges are mobilising at breakneck pace in protest of what they call an illegal and politicised process adopted by the PSC.
