PARLIAMENT Law, History and Practice

PARLIAMENT Law, History and Practice Pasan Jayasinghe Peter Reid Asanga Welikala Parliament: Law, History and Politics Pasan Jayasinghe Peter Reid Asanga Welikala Publisher: Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), Colombo, Sri Lanka Cover image courtesy The Lunuganga Trust ISBN978-955-4746-90-9 Bar Code – 9 789554 746909 Copyright © | CPA and the Authors A NOTE ON THE PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS AND THE ARCHITECT Andrew Cusack1 When Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa, on behalf of the government of President J.R. Jayewardene, obtained the consent of Parliament to relocate the national legislature to a new administrative centre called Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte, the task of designing the country’s new Parliament was given to Sri Lanka’s most eminent architect, Geoffrey Bawa. One of Bawa’s pencil sketches of the proposed Parliament is reproduced on the cover of this book. Bawa’s story is, in many ways typically atypical of Sri Lanka. His grandfather was a Muslim lawyer who married an Englishwoman of Huguenot extraction. Their son became one of the most prominent lawyers in Colombo, and married a Burgher lady of Dutch and Sinhalese descent. Geoffrey was born in 1919, and left to study English at Cambridge before completing his own legal studies in London. After the end of the Second World War, Bawa became disenchanted with the prospect of a legal life and spent a year travelling the world; first throughout the Orient, then across the Pacific to America, and finally around Europe. A stay in Lake Garda convinced him of the beauty of Italy, especially of Italian architecture and landscaping. Bawa returned to an independent Ceylon, bought a derelict rubber plantation and planned to transform it into his own tropical version of an Italian lakeside garden. As his interest in architecture grew, he took an apprenticeship with the Colombo firm of Edwards, Reid, and Begg before transferring directly into 1 Andrew Cusack is a researcher in the UK House of Commons who also writes about architectural history. the third year of studies at the Architecture Association’s school in London. His final year was spent in Rome, where he completed his dissertation on the German Baroque architect Johann Balthasar Neumann. The early work of Geoffrey Bawa is best described as ‘tropical modernism,’ attempting to adapt the ideas of Le Corbusier to a tropical setting. The results were mixed, but as Bawa the architect matured, he began to exhibit a greater appreciation of the Sri Lankan vernacular in his work. Terms like ‘contemporary vernacular’ and ‘contextual modernism’ became the bywords of Bawa. Having been commissioned by Parliament to design its new home, Bawa took several helicopter flights over the site to determine how it could best be used. He proposed the marshy land be flooded to create an artificial lake, placing the parliament building on the high ground at the centre, on a twelve-acre island in the middle of the lake. In his own words, Bawa “conceived of the Parliament as an island capitol surrounded by a new garden city of parks and public buildings. Its cascade of copper roofs would first be seen from the approach road at a distance of two kilometres floating above the new lake at the end of the Diyavanna valley.” The design placed the main chamber in a central pavilion surrounded by a cluster of five satellite pavilions. Each pavilion is defined by its own umbrella roof of copper and seems to grow out of its own plinth, although the plinths are actually connected to form a continuous ground and first floor. The main pavilion is symmetrical about an axis running north-south through the debating chamber, the Speaker’s chair and the formal entrance portal. But the power of this axis and the scale of the main roof are diffused by the asymmetric arrangement of the lesser pavilions around it. As a result, the pavilions each retain a separate identity but join together to create a single upward sweep of roofs. The use of copper in place of tile gives the roofs a thinness and the tent-like quality of a stretched skin.2 Because Ceylon spent a comparatively long time as a Commonwealth Realm of the House of Windsor, many traditions of Britannic origin remain. The privileges and customs of the Sri Lankan Parliament are derived from the practice of the House of Commons. At ceremonial sittings of Parliament, the President and the Speaker are preceded into the chamber by the uniformed mace-bearer carrying the body’s mace. And while semicircles are all the vogue in modern parliament buildings, Geoffrey Bawa’s design retained the more traditional antiphonal arrangement so widespread throughout the Commonwealth.3 2 All quotations are from David G. Robson, Bawa: Genius of the Place: An Architect of Sri Lanka (Deutsches Architekturmuseum 2004) 45. 3 Andrew Cusack, ‘The Senate of South Africa’, 17th November 2009: http://www.andrewcusack.com/2009/senate-cape-town/ Table of Contents Foreword by The Speaker .................................................................. i Preface ................................................................................................. iv Message from FNF ............................................................................ vi 1. Authors’ Introduction .................................................................... 1 2. Parliament in Its Historical and Constitutional Context .......... 6 3. Powers and Privileges of Parliament ......................................... 29 4. The Speaker ................................................................................... 44 5. The Legislative Process ................................................................ 55 6. The Committee System ............................................................... 70 7. Parliamentary Oversight of States of Emergency and Counter Terrorism Powers .................................................... 118 8. Parliament and Fourth Pillar Institutions ............................... 123 9. Parliamentary Services ............................................................... 135 Bibliography ..................................................................................... 147 FOREWORD BY THE SPEAKER Understanding the Role of Parliament in a Democratic Republic Throughout the majority of our day-to-day lives, we relate to Parliament as that place where our elected representatives ply their trade. When the people elect Members of Parliament, they largely imagine a process of selecting politicians to represent their interests in the business of voting for and against the passage of laws. However, in the last five years, many more of Parliament’s constitutionally mandated roles have been thrust into the centre of our national discourse. From the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in April 2015, the spirited public debates that have surrounded the various lapses exposed in successive incisive reports by the Committee on Public Enterprise (better known by its acronym COPE), to the introduction of the Constitutional Council – and with it a critical role for Parliament in the curation of the independent commissions and the judiciary – Parliament’s place in the public pecking order was well on the rise by the time I had the privilege of being selected as its Speaker just over four years ago. In the past year of my tenure as the elected advocate of the House, the proceedings of this august assembly have gripped the country on a number of occasions, sparking national curiosity and intrigue over the role of Parliament and the roots of its powers. Last November, our Parliament for the first time passed a vote of no- confidence in a government. This was followed shortly thereafter by a unique resolution that leveraged the parliamentary power of the purse to choke off funding from those purporting to serve as a government without the sanction of the House. i Earlier this year, in the wake of the horrific Easter terrorist attacks, Parliament was called upon to ratify and as necessary extend the State of Emergency declared by the President, and thereafter, for the first time in Sri Lanka’s history, the House appointed a Select Committee to probe serious lapses in the security apparatus that gave way to the attacks. It is in light of such developments that public interest in the genesis of Parliament, its history, role, and constitutional influence has reached an all-time high. In this book, the authors spared no effort in wresting the hidden secrets of generations of scholarship and parliamentary tradition, and distilling this knowledge into an accessible work of literature steeped in an intimately Sri Lankan context. Whether it is setting out the individual duties and powers of our own Parliament in their historical context, explaining the evolution of newer and more uniquely Sri Lankan governance features like the Constitutional Council or walking the readers through various iterations of parliamentary oversight structures from around the globe, Parliament: Law, History and Practice is a unique resource for scholars, lawmakers, attorneys, students, and civic-minded citizens who seek to better understand the legacy of our legislative apparatus, or indeed, to contribute to its advancement in the years to come. In particular, it is the future generations who will shape the trajectory of our republic, who may most value the opportunity to have their political views and objectives informed by the best practices and lessons learned from legislatures past and present so readily accessible in these pages. Unfortunately, despite

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