Hon. Rauff Hakeem, Attorney-at-Law
Hon. Rauff Hakeem questioned the Attorney-General’s Department’s handling of a Bill where two judges had found certain clauses inconsistent with Article 12(1) of the Constitution, requiring a two-thirds parliamentary majority. He argued that the Department should have identified the inconsistency at the outset and issued the necessary certificate to Cabinet, which he said could have avoided the subsequent procedural issue and expedited the case.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Just a brief clarification, Mr. Speaker. In the determination, two of the Judges of the Bench have stated that certain clauses are inconsistent with Article 12(1) of the Constitution and therefore must be passed by a two-thirds majority in Parliament. I am saying that if the Attorney-General’s Department had properly reviewed this from the outset and given a certificate to the Cabinet that these clauses are inconsistent, this case could have been concluded in a single day on the basis of that certificate. This is a failing of the Attorney-General’s Department. Did the Attorney-General’s Department not know, when we filed, that these clauses were inconsistent? Knowing that they were inconsistent, the Department should have clearly given a certificate. If the Bill had been presented with that certificate, this problem would not have arisen.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Friday, 14 February 2025 ·No. 1739959022084634 ·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/24429
Cite as: Hon. Rauff Hakeem, Attorney-at-Law. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 14 February 2025. No. 1739959022084634. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/24429