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

The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake

Jathika Jana balawegaya· National List· 13 November 2025 ·Procedural: Privilege Matters and Procedural Issues

Parliamentary Procedure
AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Bimal Rathnayake requested the Speaker’s attention to the Parliament (Powers and Privileges) Act, following issues raised by the COPE Chair. He emphasized COPE’s role in parliamentary oversight of public finances and noted that it is an investigative committee without enforcement powers. He urged that an alleged breach of privilege involving public insults to Parliament or its officers be treated as a priority with zero tolerance.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Speaker, I draw your attention to the Parliament (Powers and Privileges) Act. The COPE Chair raised many issues. COPE is among the key committees exercising Parliament’s oversight of public finances. It is an investigative body without police or military powers. We request you to prioritize this breach of privilege—there must be zero tolerance for publicly insulting Parliament or its officers.

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Thursday, 13 November 2025 ·No. 22816 ·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/26986

Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 13 November 2025. No. 22816. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/26986