Friday, November 9, 2012

The big let down - legal eagles have shamed the process


Mr President – Why are you not mad at your legal advisers for making you look so amateurish in the world of public opinion?

The once envious legal profession seems to be in crisis, reaching a new low with the contents of the charge sheet. The President’s legal advisers on Constitutional Law, Mohan Peiris, GL Peiris and Asoka de Silva have let him down in the 14 point charge sheet presented to the Speaker calling for the Impeachment of the Chief Justice of Sri Lanka. Surely it must have been prepared under their direction and it is a shoddy document with no teeth.

Further, the Constituents of the PSC are too heavily weighted with yes men, and none with independent thinkers, a requirement for it to be objective. This will not auger well for a balanced review and therefore will be unkindly referred to as the Kangaroo Court of the Regime.

If one looks at the psychology of those who advise the President if they believe they are invincible because they represent a regime that is totalitarian, then they would not be careful in their drafting of the motion. After all the motion is full of elementary errors of fact that needs to be corrected!!

In reality the Chief Justice should be credited for the confident and swift manner in which she has dealt with all the accusations deftly through her lawyers Neelakandan and Neelakandan, who answered all the questions to the newspapers that have laid out accusations of a misleading nature.

It will be interesting to see what next as the onus is on the Govt. to prove these are impeachable, and now the facts starkly look mighty irrelevant in the context of seriousness of the lapse of conduct. I cannot see anyone in Govt. caught off guard by such flimsy evidence, trying to justify impeachment  anymore in any but the lamest excuse for a reason!

It is time the President distances himself from these people to save face and perhaps sack them as his advisers for deliberately making him look stupid, especially as he is also a lawyer and should know better.

It seems to me that when power goes to people’s heads, they seem to lose objectivity and are unable to gauge their poor judgments. They have few people who can be honest with them, as sycophants only want to please and will not contradict or advise against a proposed action, however it may seem

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