The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake
Hon. Bimal Rathnayake defended the Speaker’s ruling on a constitutional matter, stating that such decisions should be informed by legal advice and parliamentary experience. He rejected criticism of reliance on legal experts, cited Hon. Anura Bandaranaike’s precedent, and asserted that Parliament’s powers should not be diminished or diverted. He also alleged that the opposition’s aim was to disrupt parliamentary proceedings.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Speaker, I am not speaking to create a debate on the Ruling you have given. But primarily I wish to say this: those who pay to have speeches written will need writers to script their speeches. Without legal advice, presenting arguments on a grave constitutional matter like this and mocking those who rely on legal experts is absurd. Even Hon. Anura Bandaranaike, when he gave his Ruling, did so on the advice of legal experts. In my view, you, as Hon. Speaker, should take advice from various legal experts and also draw from your own experience in presenting such a determination. Therefore, we acknowledge your study and presentation. We do not expect the powers of Parliament to be belittled, nor will we allow Parliamentary power to be diverted elsewhere. Today their intention is to completely disrupt Parliament.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Friday, 9 January 2026 ·No. 23149 ·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
/lk/speeches/1577
Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 9 January 2026. No. 23149. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/1577