10th Parliament· 154 sittings on record · 30,475 speeches · latest 10 June 2026

The Hon. Nalin Bandara Jayamaha

Samagi Jana Balawegaya· Kurunegala· 18 December 2024 ·Procedural: Procedural Matters and Points of Order

Parliamentary Procedure
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Nalin Bandara Jayamaha argued that the Chairmanship of COPE should be given to the Opposition, noting that the committee already has a Government-side majority and that Opposition leadership would not obstruct its work. He referred to the previous practice of appointing Hon. Sunil Handunnetti as COPE Chair and urged that this tradition be continued to ensure proper oversight of government institutions.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Mr. Speaker, we were not in Government previously, but we served on COPE and contributed. If the COPE Chair is retained by the Government because its own institutional files will come up—not that we say they will steal—that is wrong. Most COPE Members are from the Government side anyway; giving the Chair to the Opposition will not hinder ongoing reviews. We created a good tradition by giving the COPE Chair to Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, who did a fine job. We should continue that tradition.

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Wednesday, 18 December 2024 ·No. 1735286612086554 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
Page · column
not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
Permalink
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Cite as: The Hon. Nalin Bandara Jayamaha. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 18 December 2024. No. 1735286612086554. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/12154