{"id":119266,"date":"2021-10-16T23:49:38","date_gmt":"2021-10-17T05:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=119266"},"modified":"2021-10-16T16:42:18","modified_gmt":"2021-10-16T23:42:18","slug":"citizens-right-to-reject-to-prevent-corrupt-entering-parliament","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2021\/10\/16\/citizens-right-to-reject-to-prevent-corrupt-entering-parliament\/","title":{"rendered":"Citizens Right to Reject to prevent corrupt entering Parliament"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shenali D Waduge<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Every\ncitizen is in unison that since 1948 Sri Lanka\u2019s progress has been stalled and\ndenied because of corrupt politicians and their encouragement of a corrupt\nsystem that has attracted corrupt public officials, corrupt businessmen,\ncorrupt cronies & even corrupt citizens. As a result, Sri Lanka has never\nenjoyed national policies that remain intact and planned for short-medium and\nlong term purposes that do not get changed with every change of government.\nUnfortunately, the voters are left with electing the lesser evil because they\nhave hardly any choice. This is not how democracy should work if sovereignty\nrests with the people. The first step for politicians to enter the system is at\nnomination stage where individuals hand over applications to respective parties\nto be selected by the Party nomination selection committee. It is therefore,\nproposed that the people be given a RIGHT TO REJECT provision to enable\ncitizens to petition respective Party Secretariat to not accept the\nnomination(s) of a particular individual(s). The Party is then bound to not\naccept that person\u2019s nomination application. This would clean out the corrupt\nand prevent them entering Parliament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nRight to Reject is in other words the People\u2019s mandate but will need to be\ncarefully worked out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since\nwe are all aware of likely future elections, planning to call for nominations\ncan be planned well in advance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\npetition minimum requirement will need to be looked into based on district or\nsmaller constituencies and a % depending on the population can be set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Therefore,\nif X wishes to contest elections via a particular party, his name will need to\nbe published by that party and the people of the district\/constituency that he\nis contesting can petition to reject him & citizens will need to obtain the\nrequired % of petitions to force a political party not to include the name of\nthat person to the final nomination list to contest elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nRight to Reject petition must give valid reasons why citizens do not wish to\nhave him be included into the nomination list of their party. This petition\nwill need to be carefully drafted with criteria for who can petition and the\npetitioners details as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nthis manner, the people can slowly start to filter out the corrupt politicians\nfrom entering parliament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overseas there is a provision known as Right to Recall any\npolitician AFTER they enter Parliament but not too many Ministers have been\nremoved with this provision. Once\nthe corrupt enter a Parliament and when they are the ones that make the legislation\n\u2013 if they are corrupt, how can we expect them to bring in laws to prevent their\ncorrupt ways!Therefore, the best and only option is to think of ways that the\npeople can democratically prevent the corrupt or people with corrupt records\nfrom entering Parliament. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps\nthe Elections Department can have a separate office for this facility to uphold\nthe sovereignty of the People. Hopefully, the Right to Reject option will get\ninternational acceptance as well. The corrupt and corrupted system exists not\nonly in Sri Lanka but all over the world as well. So we need to devise checks\nand balances to mitigate the damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shenali D Waduge<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shenali D Waduge Every citizen is in unison that since 1948 Sri Lanka\u2019s progress has been stalled and denied because of corrupt politicians and their encouragement of a corrupt system that has attracted corrupt public officials, corrupt businessmen, corrupt cronies & even corrupt citizens. As a result, Sri Lanka has never enjoyed national policies that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shenali-waduge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}