IPU to take up UPFA rebel grievances

By Uditha Kumarasinghe

The Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union is to ask Parliament Speaker Karu Jayasuriya to resolve their grieveances, says the delegation of rebel UPFA parliamentarians that went to complain to the IPU.

The UPFA rebels who call themselves the ‘Joint Opposition’ made a highly publicized trip to Geneva, Switzerland, last week in their continuing bid to get some recognition of their group as a formal opposition group in parliament. They complaint to the IPU included several issues, including violation of parliamentary privilages and harassement by the FCID.

UPFA Colombo MP Udaya Gammanpila told the Sunday Observer that the IPU Secretary General Martin Chungong told them that he would facilitate a dialogue between Speaker Karu Jayasuriya and the Joint Opposition to reach consensus about the issue and failing which to hold a formal inquiry and announce its outcome.

Gammanpila who was part of the delegation along with MPs Dullas Alahapperuma and Bandula Gunawardena said that if the Joint Opposition had been fighting for its rights in Parliament over the past seven months, they failed to convince the Speaker about the logic of their demands and therefore they decided to complain to the IPU which acts as a trade union of parliamentarians.

Gammanpila said that during discussion on March 31, IPU Secretary General told them that he met Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament Karu Jayasuriya at a recent conference in Lusaka where he had him that he would meet a Joint Opposition parliamentary delegation of Sri Lanka on March 31. However, Speaker Jayasuriya had reportedly said that he had already resolved the problems of the Joint Opposition. But we told the IPU Secretary General that if that is the case, the Joint Opposition members should have not come to Geneva by spending so much of time and money.

The Joint Opposition members highlighted six main issues in their letter handed over to the IPU Secretary General. They are, the recognition of a party leader who has only 16 parliamentarians in the House as the Leader of the Opposition, being given the post of the Chief Opposition Whip to the JVP which has merely six MPs in Parliament, not being given an adequate representation for the Joint Opposition in committees such as COPE and PAC, Ministers intolerably taking long time to reply the oral questions raised by the Joint Opposition members, bad precedence by Prime Minister himself to give irrelevant answers to the oral questions and use the FCID as political witch-hunt against the Joint Opposition members.