Font size: 
Those who are made unhappy by lawlessness constitute the majority. Most miserable are the victims of lawlessness who are exposed to personal tragedies.
Two stories illustrate such happiness and misery in Sri Lanka.
Inspector Sena Suraweera must be one of those very happy people. In 2002 he was the first respondent in a fundamental rights application filed by Gerard Perera. Perera complained that several police officers at the Wattala Police Station severely tortured him to the extent that he suffered renal failure.
The case before the Supreme Court revealed that Perera was arrested simply because he had the name “Gerard.” It was clearly a careless arrest. The Supreme Court found Inspector Suraweera and three other police officers to have violated the fundamental rights of Gerard Perera by illegal arrest, detention and torture.
As a respondent, Suraweera filed an affidavit stating that the arrest and detention were carried out under his direction. Regarding this affidavit the Supreme Court, in its final judgement, commented as follows:
The 1st Respondent (Inspector Sena Suraweera) admitted that the Petitioner was arrested on his directions. He did not claim that he was away from the Station when the Petitioner was brought in, or during the next few hours when the Petitioner was allegedly tortured. As Officer-in-Charge he had overall responsibility to supervise and control the conduct of his subordinates, and it was he who had the power to release the Petitioner. He is therefore liable if the Petitioner's arrest and/or detention were unlawful, and for any torture that occurred at the Station.
After the verdict in this case, the attorney general filed an indictment against seven police officers from the Wattala Police Station, charging them under the Convention against Torture Act, Act No. 22 of 1994. This carries a mandatory sentence of seven year’s rigorous imprisonment and a hefty fine. The seventh accused of that case was Inspector Suraweera. Up to this point the law had prevailed and the inspector had good reason to worry.
However, he wrote a letter to the attorney general denying responsibility for what was in his earlier affidavit, and blaming an assistant superintendent of police above him for the arrest and all that followed. For some reason the attorney general decided to believe the contents of this letter and to disbelieve the affidavit that had been filed before the Supreme Court. He made application to the High Court of Negombo to remove Inspector Suraweera from the list of accused.
This action would have brought immense relief and happiness to the inspector, as the threat of jail disappeared, together with whatever responsibility he owed for the affidavit he filed in the Supreme Court.
A number of years later Inspector Suraweera was called as a witness by the six accused policemen who were still facing trial at the Negombo High Court. Here too, giving evidence from the witness box, Suraweera disowned the affidavit that had been filed in his name before the Supreme Court as the first respondent in the fundamental rights case. The versions of his story were several and each contradicted the other. One version was that he signed a set of blank papers and therefore had no knowledge of the contents of the affidavit.
Later the Registrar of the Supreme Court produced the file of the case before the High Court and when the relevant affidavit was shown to him, Inspector Suraweera denied that the signature was his. He went further, denying repeatedly the contents of the affidavit in which he had originally accepted overall responsibility for the arrest and detention of Gerard Perera.
The deputy solicitor general who prosecuted the case brought this serious matter of the denial of the veracity of an affidavit filed to the Supreme Court, which would constitute a serious act of perjury as well as an act of contempt, to the notice of the High Court. Since Inspector Suraweera was a senior state officer with over 30 years of experience as a police officer, the seriousness of the act should have been evident.
Inspector Suraweera was naturally seriously worried and sought advice from many persons. Under normal circumstances he would have had to take the consequences of the denial of his affidavit. Many persons have gone to jail in Sri Lanka for denying statements they made in lower courts at High Court trials.
However, happily for him, circumstances have changed. No law enforcement agency has brought up the matter of the denial of the affidavit before any authority or court. The inspector, by denying responsibility for the affidavit, was relieved from the High Court trial and was also able to give a completely different version of events to the Negombo High Court.
Of course the unhappy party is the victim’s family. The victim had been arrested purely on mistaken identity, tortured and latter killed for daring to complain about it and wanting to give evidence against police officers before the High Court.
Such unhappiness can also be illustrated by another case that came to light this week. Asantha Aravinda, a young man, was traveling on his scooter with a friend. Someone who had developed animosity against him pursued him in a truck and intentionally rear-ended the scooter. Aravindra was thrown some distance and his friend was dragged under the truck along with the scooter. Aravindra’s friend suffered serious injuries.
When Aravindra tried to hire a vehicle to take his friend to a hospital, the truck driver who had fled the scene arrived with a party of police officers. The police party, consisting of an inspector and five or six other officers, arrested Aravindra and started beating him severely. When he cried for help and asked for some water the truck driver, in the presence of the police, gave him acid to drink. When Aravindra realised what it was he refused to drink it. The truck driver, in full view of the police officers, threw the acid into Aravindra’s face, and it went into one of his eyes.
The police officers kept Aravindra and his friend for several days at the police station with their injuries unattended to. When he was finally taken to a hospital he had already lost the sight in one eye. Surgery failed to restore his sight.
However, neither the truck driver who threw the acid nor the police officers who participated in these gruesome acts have anything to worry about. They remain free, beneficiaries of the lawlessness in the country. It is Aravindra and his friend who have to worry, since fabricated charges have been filed against them for possession of firearms and acts of violence that could land them in jail for several years.
In these stories, wearing a uniform protected those who committed unlawful acts, whereas their victims had no protection at all. This is the sad state of affairs in Sri Lanka today.
--
(Basil Fernando is director of the Asian Human Rights Commission based in Hong Kong. He is a Sri Lankan lawyer who has also been a senior U.N. human rights officer in Cambodia. He has published several books and written extensively on human rights issues in Asia. His blog can be read at http://srilanka-lawlessness.com.)
