Editorial Courtesy The Daily News

The Lawyers’ Collective goes against the decision of its own professional body, the Bar Association to say that the new Chief Justice Mohan Peiris appointed yesterday, will not be recognized. But, this is no Lawyers’ Collective in the first place – it’s a motley collection of dollar-awash NGO mandarins, losing politicians who have repeatedly appeared on the opposition party’s ticket, and of course lawyer sidekicks of a has-been – and now very disgruntled –former President.

It’s not a Lawyers Collective, it’s a Lawyers Selective, that comprises of a narrow segment of people with very partisan motives, either political or foreign-driven, that have in their desperation to emerge from the political wilderness, taken up a hapless former Chief Justice’s already lost cause.

Shirani Bandaranayake, the former Chief Justice is now citizen Bandarnayake, and to call her the Chief Justice and ask for the summary rejection of the new Chief Justice appointed by Executive hand yesterday, is to be not only in contempt of the Legislature, but also in contempt of court. Anybody that subverts the functioning of court is by law liable to be brought before court and sentenced, and the Lawyers’ Collective is inviting just such an action by pretending that a private citizen is the Chief Justice, while rejecting the person rightfully occupying that post as per Executive decree – and ratification by the Legislature as per the 18th Amendment.

There is a simple word for such foolhardy behaviour — desperation. J. C. Weliamuna is not the only NGO desperado who is going out on a limb to have an imposter occupy the Chief Justice’s chair. There is also perennial NGO loser Jehan Perera, among others such as Paikiasothy of course, rearing to make greater clowns of themselves than ever before, by making the most risible statements regarding the situation that follows the impeachment.

States Jehan in one of his regular pedantic but yet soap-box style op-ed contributions, that a newly assertive Supreme Court might now reverse the decisions on the crossover MPs in Parliament so as to deprive the government of the two-thirds majority. What? And go against the Supreme Court judgements that gave the crossover MPs the right to get to the other side of the aisle, given legal imprimatur by the very former Chief Justice who they covet so much, and want kept by force in office?

These are people who as much as they were down on their knees during the last phase of the war hoping for a reprieve for Prabhakaran and a stoppage to the successful crackdown on his fascism, now have gone down on their knees again praying – beseeching — for a collapse of the Rule of Law, and chaos resulting from their addle-headed, harebrained and totally hilarious idea to keep the former CJ in office!

What’s legal cannot be countermanded by something that is profoundly embarrassing, and the reference here is to the behaviour of the NGO fringe-lunatics, as it is to the Appeal Court judgement from which these eccentrics attempt to obtain the veneer of legitimacy for their cringe inducing acts of ham-handedness.

The fact that the Supreme Court judges and the Appeals Court judges as a body met with the President after the vote on the impeachment and just before the signing of the order of removal of the former Chief Justice, makes clear even to the most stubbornly moronic, what was obvious from the beginning — which is that a constitutional process cannot and will not be interfered with by the judges of the two highest courts in the land.

It is in the teeth of news of these meetings that the NGO bandmasters try to call a tune that nobody can dance to — and very few people have the inkling to dance to anyway, even if they could …

However, it is the self-serving nature of these pretenders and their imposter Chief Justice that is intolerable. It is entertaining as long as their act is a circus, but if they cross the thin line and disrupt court work and the legitimacy of due process, they should surely by law be dealt with for contempt.