Sri Lanka's top court dismisses rights petition on constitutionality of presidential poll

Colombo, Jul 15 (PTI) Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a fundamental rights petition, which could have delayed the holding of the impending presidential election.
     A three-member Supreme Court bench presided by Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya imposed costs on the petitioner, a lawyer, who had filed a case calling to delay the election claiming that the 19th Amendment to the Constitution adopted in 2015 had not been properly passed as there was no referendum held to adopt it.
     This was the second action filed in the Supreme Court over the presidential election, which is to be held between September 17 and October 16.
     The opposition was seeing the court cases as moves by the government – President Ranil Wickremesinghe – to delay the holding of the election enabling him to continue in office without an election.
     They charged 75-year-old Wickremesinghe, who succeeded Gotabaya Rajapaksa, as the stopgap president feared facing the election.
     Wickremesinghe, however, has assured that the election would be held on time by the independent elections commission.
     Earlier on July 10, the government had announced that the Sri Lankan Cabinet had approved a move to amend the Constitution giving clarity to the terms of both the president and Parliament, restricting it to five years only.
     The terms for both posts are already five years as per the 19th Amendment since 2015. However, the problem was over Article 83, which said the term could be extended to six from five with a referendum.
     A petitioner had approached the Supreme Court asking it to define if the terms were five or six years.
     The Supreme Court had rejected the petition which sought a ruling on the seeming ambiguity between 30(2) and 83 in the Constitution, which means, it will be five years only.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)