The Hon. Dilith Jayaweera
Hon. Dilith Jayaweera said the Opposition initially supported emergency regulations in good faith following a serious disaster, but argued that the current provisions include matters unrelated to disaster relief and could be misused. He urged the Government to limit or reframe the regulations strictly to what is necessary for disaster response, warning that Sri Lanka’s history of emergency misuse has created public suspicion.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Presiding Member, we in the Opposition agreed in good faith to emergency regulations when a grave disaster struck, because the Government seemed unable to swiftly provide relief. But now, as Hon. Ajith P. Perera said, many provisions unrelated to disaster relief are included, creating public suspicion. Sri Lanka has a history of emergency misuse; people elected this Government expecting you not to repeat that. Yet you appear to be doing just that—exploiting every constitutional opportunity.
¶ 02 Given the Government’s track record of undemocratic actions, we have no assurance these will not be misused. If you truly intend relief, reframe the regulations to what is necessary for disaster response. Otherwise, even your voters will rise against you.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Tuesday, 6 January 2026 ·No. 23111 ·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.
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/lk/speeches/17675
Cite as: The Hon. Dilith Jayaweera. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 6 January 2026. No. 23111. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/17675