The People vs The President
Sri Lankan president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa finally resigned on 14 July 2022. The Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament confirmed the resignation on 15 July 2022. This is a tremendous victory for the people who have asserted their sovereignty through their daily activism. Recognizing the Sri Lankan crisis as a constitutional moment to introduce legal-political reforms is imperative to respond to the worst economic crisis the country has faced since independence and to engage with the diverse range of protestors within a constitutional-political framework.
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Constitutional Ping-Pong
Sri Lanka is at a moment of reckoning, with its political class, its public institutions and with its collective identity. The rupture caused by this unprecedented and tragic crisis has brought the country to a unique political moment in which the majority of Sri Lankans are demanding and imagining a better collective future. For the first time in Sri Lanka’s history, the demands for constitutional governance articulated through traditions of protest and dissent expressed mostly by marginalized groups are now being echoed by the mainstream.
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