Citizens and Officials.

By Citizen Somapala

(March 18, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) In a nation there are two categories of persons, the citizens and the officials. Of course these two categories are interchangeable. The citizens become officials and the officials in turn, return to the status of citizens. However during the time in which the officials rule in their official positions they are different to ordinary citizens and it is worth reflecting on this in a little way because there are many important lessons that either be learned or lost when there is insufficient reflection on these matters. Citizen Somapala has only ever been a citizen and never an official.

However, he is aware of many who have been officials; some of them very important officials and they too have returned to the status of ordinary citizens at one time or another. By thinking about them, some of the complexities of this relationship might be understood.

Some months ago Sarath Nanda Silva was one such official. He was a state counsel, an attorney general, president of the Court of Appeal and finally the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He is now an ordinary citizen like many others.

The only thing that a citizen can rely on for his protection is the law. The citizens need the protection of the law. If they are not protected by the law they can lose anything and everything. They can be robbed by other citizens or placed in serious difficulties by the officials. In order to be safe the citizens need to feel that the law exists and that the law can be resorted to if they are being unduly attacked. If this sense of protection is lost life can become a nightmare.

Let us take the case of Sundaya Ekanaliyagoda whose journalist husband went gone missing on the 24th January of this year. To-date, she and her children have no idea as to what might have happened to him. Under normal circumstances they would have turned to the police and they would have had every right to expect that the country's policing system was capable of solving the riddle. From the OIC of the local police station to the Inspector General of Police there is supposed to be a system that has to deal with such a problem and for the citizen to be assisted in solving such a problem.

In many ways the citizens throughout the country today in Sri Lanka are finding that they are not provided with this basic service by the state and the officers who hold the positions in which they are supposed to solve the citizen's problems. When the officers are unaware of their responsibilities the citizens has the right to turn to those who run the government and to ask them to ensure that the officers do their job. If the government and the officers both fail in their responsibilities then there is a situation in which the citizen can no longer find protection through the law.

Therefore the responsibilities of those who hold office need to be constantly examined by the citizens themselves if their association as a nation is to retain some meaning for them. In this the judiciary has the most important role to play. It is the duty of the judiciary to sort out problems of the law that the officers should normally resolve. The citizens seek the help of the judiciary when the find that the officers are not performing their tasks with adequate efficiency and speed or responsibility. It is at that point that the judiciary has to intervene and to ensure that the citizen has the protection of the law. In a situation such as that of Sundaya Ekanaliyagoda it should have been the duty of the judiciary to assist speedily and ensure that the law enforcement agency carries out its duty in finding the missing citizen. If the judiciary fails in this then the citizen is completely without the protection of the law.

According to some recent studies there has been close to 1000 cases of habeas corpus actions that have come before the courts in recent decades. The courts have been able to ensure that the officers have done their utmost to solve the problems of missing citizens. However, in many cases for one reason or other cases has been delayed for years and at the end have been dismissed. Habeas Corpus actions are regarded in all great legal systems as the final resort of the system in assisting citizens in the protection of their civil liberties. For whatever be the reason in Sri Lanka this legal remedy is now considered to be a lost remedy. There is not a single instance in which this remedy has been found to be useful to citizens looking for their missing loved ones when the state fails to provide protection the citizens and at the same time violates international laws relating to protection.

The question is: who is to resolve this problem? The answer is quite simply, those who hold official positions. It is up to them to resolve the problem of the protection of citizens. The protection of the law to the citizens is granted through the actions of officials. When the officials fail to provide that protection then where does the citizen stand? What happens to the basic relationship of the citizen to the nation? How does this affect the cementing of the relationship which is the law? If the law can be ignored by the officials either on the basis that they do not agree with the law because it is not good enough as in the case of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution or that it is too dangerous to try to provide protection to citizens as in the case of disappearances and other issues faced by the citizens then what is the meaning of citizenship?