C. A. Chandraprema, in Island, 19 December 2018, entitled “A UNP govt. under a hostile President” with highlighting being the work of The Editor, Thuppahi
The whole purpose of making it virtually impossible to dissolve Parliament until the lapse of a period of four and a half years was a knee-jerk reaction to the dissolution of Parliament in 2004 by Chandrika Kumaratunga, who sent the UNP into the political wilderness for over a decade. While the recent Supreme Court decision shows that the UNP has succeeded in achieving its objective, the wisdom of what it did through the 19th Amendment needs to be called into question. What is surprising is that there would be so-called ‘constitutional experts’ who would seek to insert such an ill-thought out provision into the Constitution without giving any thought to the practical aspects of running a government.
