What's new

Welcome

If you already have an account, please login, but if you don't have one yet, you are more than welcome to freely join the community of lawyers around the world..

Register Log in
  • We don't have any responsibilities about the news being sent in this site. Legal News are automatically being collected from sources and submitted in this forum by feed readers. Source of each news is set in the news and a link to its source is always added.
    (Any News older than 21 days from its post time will be deleted automatically!)

Jurist Sri Lanka parliament passes constitutional amendment expanding presidential power

Status
Not open for further replies.
  • Thread starter
  • Staff
  • #1

Dadparvar

Staff member
Nov 11, 2016
6,889
0
6
The Parliament of Sri Lanka Thursday passed the Twentieth Amendment to the country’s constitution, repealing a past administration’s limitations on presidential powers and expansion of parliamentary powers. The amendment has raised concerns that authoritarian President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s power has become unbounded. The amendment was passed in the Sri Lankan House by a vote of 156-65.

The amendment allows the president to appoint and change the members of the Cabinet of Ministers, as well as control the authorities who oversee elections and human rights. It further expands the president’s power by allowing for the submission of a bill to the general population by referendum after the Parliament rejects it. In addition, Article 70 of the Sri Lankan Constitution was altered by the Twentieth Amendment to allow the president to:

ummon, prorogue and dissolve Parliament . . . [p]rovided that . . . a General Election has been held consequent upon a dissolution of Parliament by the President, the President shall not thereafter dissolve Parliament until the expiration of a period of one year from the date of such General Election, unless Parliament by resolution requests the president to dissolve Parliament.


President Rajapaksa had already successfully dissolved the Sri Lankan Parliament earlier this year.

The president, a member of the Sri Lanka Podujana Party (SLPP), was elected in 2019 and has silenced dissenters and brought members of his family into the country’s government. He appointed his own brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, as Prime Minister (PM). Since that appointment, the PM has been internationally condemned for similarly alarming actions, like withdrawing from a United Nations Resolution to investigate war crimes earlier this year.



The post Sri Lanka parliament passes constitutional amendment expanding presidential power appeared first on JURIST - News - Legal News & Commentary.

Continue reading...

Note: We don't have any responsibilities about this news. Its been posted here by Feed Reader and we had no controls and checking on it. And because News posted here will be deleted automatically after 21 days, threads are closed so that no one spend time to post and discuss here. You can always check the source and discuss in their site.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top