Prof. G.L. Peiris’s Legal Lunumiris

By Citizen Somapala

(February 12, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Prof. G.L. Peiris who had been the Vice Chancellor and head of the law faculty of the Colombo University and for a long time a teacher of law, attempted to justify the arrest of the common opposition candidate, Sarath Fonseka, saying that merely because somebody was a candidate for a presidential election he was not specially privileged before the law. He was trying to justify the arrest on the basis that the law should prevail in the country. He was also trying to justify the filing of the case before a military tribunal.

This one time academic who perhaps has the largest number of post graduate degrees in law in Sri Lanka became the spokesman for the government in trying to create some legal pretext for Fonseka’s arrest. While he was talking about the rule of law he would certainly be fully aware that it does not exist in any part of the country and that there is a collapse of the rule of law everywhere in Sri Lanka.

When Prof. Peiris first entered politics he came on the basis that the rule of law had so collapsed in the country and that it was necessary to become involved in politics in order to restore it. However, in the decades that followed the rule of law did not improve but, in fact, degenerated to an extent that the entire criminal justice and constitutional systems fell into the deepest crisis. This legal luminary has nothing very much to say now on the collapse of the legal and constitutional system in the country. During the presidential election he said in the media that since retired general Sarath Fonseka was not a registered voter he was ineligible to contest the election. This kind of nonsensical statements on the law is constantly uttered by thi so-called legal intellectual. This is a reflection of the utter meaninglessness of the law within Sri Lanka. Prof. Peiris has come to represent not the prestige of the law, but the very collapse of the law.

That intellect of this sort was responsible for the law students of several generations would indicate the quality, or the absence of the quality of the legal education in Sri Lanka. Once a a High Court judge said that at one time Sri Lanka had legal luminaries but that now what it has is legal lunumiris. This can be said of Prof. G.L. Peiris.