Friday 24th April, 2026
The Opposition is intensely resentful that the government has thwarted its attempt to have President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is also Minister of Finance, summoned before the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) probing the green-channelling of 323 red-flagged freight containers in the Colombo Port in January 2025. When the Opposition members of the PSC proposed that President Dissanayake be summoned, their government counterparts put the proposal to a vote and defeated it.
The Opposition’s abortive bid was not devoid of politics, but Sri Lanka Customs, which released the aforementioned containers without mandatory inspections, is under the Finance Ministry. Therefore, the Finance Minister is accountable to Parliament and must answer questions from the container PSC, as it were.
The dispute between the government and the Opposition over the container scandal has more to it than a mere political argy-bargy. It reflects a deeper constitutional issue. The Constitution requires the President to attend Parliament, but frequent politically strategic interventions by him or her dilutes the spirit of the separation of powers and strengthens the Executive’s dominance over the legislature. This practice is bad for the wellbeing of democracy. The President has used, if not misused, Articles 32 and 33 of the Constitution to dominate Parliament in this manner over the years.
The JVP, on a campaign for abolishing the Executive Presidency, played a pivotal role in introducing the 17th, 19th and 21st Amendments to the Constitution to reduce the executive powers of the President, but ensconced in power, it is now silent on its pledge to restore a parliamentary system of government.
The Opposition has claimed that President Maithripala Sirisena testified before the PSC which probed the Easter Sunday terror attacks in 2019, and therefore President Dissanayake ought to do likewise. What it has left unsaid is that President Sirisena made a statement at the 20th meeting of that PSC, held at the Presidential Secretariat, on 20 September 2019. The PSC report has referred to the event as a ‘discussion’. Sirisena, who secured the executive presidency, promising to reduce the powers vested therein, should have refrained from undermining the legislature and visited the Parliament complex to testify before the PSC, as the Minister of Defence.
The least President Dissanayake can do to avoid the public perception that he, too, is undermining the legislature is to follow the precedent created by President Sirisena. Ideally, he ought to appear before the PSC in the parliamentary complex in keeping with his government’s much-touted commitment to upholding accountability and the separation of powers. After all, when the question of summoning President Sirisena before the PSC on the Easter Sunday attacks came up, the then JVP MP Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa, who was also a PSC member, defended the rights of Parliament. He declared that the PSC had the authority to summon anyone for questioning.
Now that the government members of the container PSC have gone out of their way to defend President Dissanayake, the question is whether they can be expected to allow an impartial investigation to be conducted and help uncover anything detrimental to the interests of the President and the ruling coalition.
By scuttling the Opposition PSC members’ effort to have President Dissanayake testify before the container PSC, and undermining the legislature in the process, the JVP-NPP government has unwittingly reminded the public of its unfulfilled election pledge to introduce a new Constitution, inter alia, “abolishing the executive presidency and appointing a president without executive powers by the parliament” (A Thriving Nation: A Beautiful Life, NPP Election Manifesto, p. 109).