Gajalakshmi Paramasivam

16 October  2020

 

 

No Affirmative Action by Dr Sabry

I sued many Australian leaders, including then Prime Minister John Howard on the basis of my belief that the root reason was Racial Discrimination. I did not expect to win in courts. But I brought out the many problems in the Judicial system by taking my position as allocated by the ‘system’. The rest of my investment became Energy. In the process of travelling along with that Energy, I realized that many of the judges were less qualified than I in Racial Discrimination issues. As stated many times, in order to deliver just outcomes, we need to believe in the measure / law used,  as deeply as  or more deeply than the litigants concerned. That is the Equal parallel of a witness giving evidence under oath.

I kept going despite the failure marks given by the Australian Judiciary. Now I know that I was heard by the original discoverers of the natural laws of humanity whose discoveries led to Antidiscrimination laws. Their belief heard me and this was confirmed to me when my book Naan Australian was taken to the National Library of Australia, via Congress Library – New Delhi Office. The effects confirmed to me that the cause as stated by me was right. Where there is lack of belief in the law, intellectual balance is essential in delivering just outcomes. Hence the ‘reasons for judgment’ need to make sense to an intellectual user of the law.

Ceylon Today published the following report under the heading ‘Cabinet Okays Ali Sabry’s paper’:

[The Ministry of Justice, issuing a press release in this connection, said the Cabinet had granted its approval to launch the three-year programme proposed by him after he had delved deeply into the issues faced by the legal sector.

Ali Sabry formed five committees comprising senior lawyers with the aim of providing solutions to these issues during a three-year period.]

When I read the list of names none of them were Tamil or Muslim names. This automatically distances the Judiciary from the ethnic issue in Sri Lanka. Our generation is therefore likely to pass on a weaker system than we inherited.

Article 12 (2) of the Sri Lankan Constitution lists the following requirement as fundamental rights – the breach of which could lead to legal action against not only minister but also the president:

[(2) No citizen shall be discriminated against on the grounds of race, religion, language, caste, sex, political opinion, place of birth or any one of such grounds : Provided that it shall be lawful to require a person to acquire within a reasonable time sufficient knowledge of any language as a qualification for any employment or office in the Public, Judicial or Local Government Service or in the service of any Public Corporation, where such knowledge is reasonably necessary for the discharge of the duties of such employment or office : Provided further that it shall be lawful to require a person to have a sufficient knowledge of any language as a qualification for any such employment or office where no function of that employment or office can be discharged otherwise than with a knowledge of that language. ]

Thesawalamai law is Customary law applicable to Jaffna Tamils – known as Malabar inhabitants. As highlighted recently, Jaffna Tamil culture has much in common with Kerala / Malabar culture. Kerala was ruled by Tamils also. Hence the cultural merger was natural.

Given that Thesawalamai law is still part of the Judicial system of Sri Lanka, Article 3 requires officers to have knowledge of Tamil when they work in Northern Province. Dr Sabry has failed to facilitate this requirement in his team. Customary laws are belief based and it is important to proportionately represent all ethnicities in any group that is addressing law and order problems in an ethnically divided country like Sri Lanka.

The racial challenges in Sri Lanka are different to the racial challenges in Australia. Muslims, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka are naturally devolved ethnic groups. They are like females and males in Traditional families to whom Thesawalamai is applicable. They had their separate areas of expertise and inheritance was also so arranged that daughters inherited from mothers and sisters and sons from fathers and brothers. This kind of devolution of power has been abused by Jaffna Tamils who traded through ‘donations’ – as was claimed by my sisters in law also. These are the family parallels of ‘buying votes’ in politics. The pollute the system and eventually damage the structures. This also seriously contributed to the rebellion by Jaffna youth looking for shortcuts to new jobs.

Tamil law experts who believe in the respective laws have the opportunity to make their contributions through social media which is likely to influence the would be litigants. As Alexander Graham Bell said ‘when one door closes another opens’. The believer is always heard through the soul power.