Features

A Godsend twice over and Louis Voumard, Victoria’s authority on property law

Published

4 years ago

2023/01/15

Excerpted from a Life in the Law by Nimal Wikramanayake

When I took up residence in Equity Chambers I would often visit my friends on the third floor. During my visits, I saw a little old man wearing a crumpled suit and he always had a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. For a couple of months I would stop and chat to this little old man. I thought he was the caretaker and I felt extremely sorry for him because he looked so lost and lonely. A delightful little friendship slowly built up and whenever I went up to the third floor I would see this little old man pottering around in one of my friends’ rooms.

One day, out of the blue, he looked at me and said, “My boy, I don’t think we’ve been introduced to each other.” I stuck my hand out and said, “I am Nimal Wikramanayake.” With a twinkle in his eye the old man said, “I am Louis Voumard.”

In 1973, property law work and conveyancing were the bread and butter of every solicitor in Victoria before successive governments in their wisdom decided to take conveyancing work away from solicitors and hand it to conveyancers. What an absolute travesty of justice!

Louis Voumard was the leader in the property field and his name was a household word in Australia. He was the son of Swiss migrants who had settled in Shepparton. They ran a milk bar. Their son was born in 1898 and they sent him down to Melbourne to study Law. He had an inauspicious beginning in the legal profession.

In the mid 1930s he had a bright idea. He would write a book on “The Sale of Land” and become an expert in property law. He devoured T Cyprian Williams’ classic work A Treatise On the Law of Vendor and Purchaser of Real Estate in more ways than one. He took large quantities of Cyprian Williams’ book and incorporated it into his work. He called his work Voumard: The Sale of Land in Victoria and it was published in 1939. This work was, I believe, one of the first of its kind in Australia and was soon called “The Bible”

I looked aghast at him and said, “You are Louis Voumard? The great Louis Voumard?”

The little old man smiled, his eyes twinkled and he said, “Yes’ I spluttered. “The great Louis Voumard?”

His eyes twinkled again and he said, “Yes, my boy.”

That was the beginning of a short but magnificent friendship. He was the only one in this great country of ours who gave me a helping hand. Over the next few months I would spend every single afternoon in his room, when I was not, on rare occasions, in court. He was always hard at work. When I walked into his room, he would look up at me with that gentle smile of his and say, “My boy, have you brought your fee with you?” and I would reply, “Can I put it on the slate?” and he would laughingly say, “Yes.”

We would then sit down and discuss art, music, politics and philosophy. This was not only refreshing but stimulating, because my conversation with my Australian barrister friends was limited to Aussie Rules football, which I knew nothing about, and cricket.

Louis was the most unusual man I have ever met. At that time he had a rival, Keith Aiken QC. Voumard never forgot his humble country roots and was known – even though he became a silk later in life and a giant in the legal profession – for the abominably low fees he charged. I have a clear recollection of something that occurred when I was his junior in a matter of advice shortly before he died. I sent a bill of $30 for my fees and the solicitor sent me a cheque for $20, saying that $30 was the fee that Lou had charged in the matter. Lou told me that he charged low fees, firstly because he did not need the money, and secondly, poor people should be ablA Godsend twice over and Louis Voumard, Victoria’s authority on property lawe to have access to his knowledge. At the time of Lou’s death in 1974, Keith Aiken was charging hundreds of dollars for an advice on law matters.

Then the first bombshell struck. Pat Gorman died and we were all in mourning for the great man. “Dashing” Des Whelan QC, who shared chambers with Pat Gorman, took over his magnificent room. Des Whelan was the leader of the Personal Injuries Bar, and later Chief Judge of the County Court. He was the father of a young barrister called Simon Whelan who came to the Bar some years later, took silk, was later appointed to the Supreme Court and later still to the Court of Appeal. Simon is a very gentle man and an exceptionally fine judge.

On August 15, 1973, I received an invitation from Des Whelan to come up to his chambers to celebrate the 75th birthday of Louis Voumard. We all went up to Des Whelan’s room that afternoon to felicitate dear, sweet Louis Voumard. I told Louis, “I know another great man whose birthday fell on August 15 and he replied, “Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte.’ Lou was born 119 years after Napoleon.

Some months later I when chatting with Lou in his room, he looked up and said, “My boy, I understand that you are helping Sonny with his book. Would you like to help me with my work? If you help me with my work you can take it over if anything happens to me. You will be made.” I was delighted and grabbed the opportunity with both hands. I then gave Sonny the sad news that I would not be working on his book but would be helping Lou with his work.

In the meantime Lou gave me a copy of his work. I did not dare tell Lou that I knew nothing about property law. At Cambridge, Property Law I was studied in the second year of the Law Tripos, and Property Law II was studied in the third year. In my second year, I studied International Law in preference to Property Law and in my third year I studied Roman-Dutch law in preference to Property Law as Roman-Dutch law was the law of Ceylon.

In Ceylon, although my master had a large property law practice, I did property law only during the six months that I was reading with him. After that I did not look at a property law brief. So when Lou asked me to help him with his work, I had not seen Contract for the Sale of Land in Victoria. I did not know what a defect of title was nor did I know what requisitions on title were. In fact, I knew nothing about property law.

I opened Lou’s work and could not understand a word of it. But over the next couple of months, I found some new authorities for him and my little friend was delighted. When my parents came out to Australia in December 1973 I invited Lou home to meet them. He drove up in his old Wolseley motor car with his paraplegic daughter, Susan. Susan was the cross Lou had had to bear for over 30 years.She had been a nurse and had been driving to Lou’s holiday home at Mt Martha many years earlier when a drunken driver swerved across the road, smashed her car, smashed her body and destroyed her life.

Noel Rice

It was the month of September 1973 and the barristers on the four big lists had a surfeit of work. Sometimes they had multiple briefs every day. I would spend most of my time twiddling my thumbs and listening to my neighbours ,Paul Bennett, who was on Foley’s list, and Paul McPhee, who was on Spur’s list, discussing the briefs they had and the income they had earned that year. Sad to say, both my dear friends are now dead. Paul Bennett proudly declared that he had earned $16,300 that year and McPhee triumphantly remarked that he had earned $17,000. I totaled up my fees and found that I had earned less than $5,000 for the 11 months of that year.

Then I had a stroke of luck in October 1973 in the shape of John McCartney and Noel Rice, the principal of the firm of Anderson, Rice and Nicol. Noel Rice was the solicitor who acted for the RACV Insurance Company in most of their motor car collision cases or what we commonly called “crash and bash” in the Magistrates’ Court. He was unable to find a barrister and Calnin telephoned me to ask whether I could go down and do a “crash and bash” at St Kilda.

Noel Rice as the RACV solicitor always acted for defendant motorists. In this particular instance he had paid in 80 per cent of the claim into court. This is what is called “a payment into court”. It is open to a defendant in a civil claim for money to pay what he or she thinks is what the complainant/plaintiff will receive by way of judgment. If the successful complainant/plaintiff receives judgment for less than the money paid into court by the defendant’s solicitor, the complainant/plaintiff is required to pay the defendant’s costs incurred in defending the proceeding.

The magistrate Kevin O’Connor took a liking to me and I managed to have my client found 60 per cent negligent and the other party 40 per cent negligent. I beat the payment into court by 20 per cent so the complainant had to pay the costs my client incurred in defending the proceedings. When I returned to chambers I gave Noel Rice the good news and he was delighted.

I heard nothing from him for about two weeks when he rang me up without going through Calnin and briefed me in another “crash and bash” He had paid in his usual 80 per cent and I got him an award of 60 per cent. This result led to a long and fruitful relationship over the next four years. He then started briefing me, first with one brief a week, and then two and soon I was receiving three briefs from him a week.

In December 1973, our happy chamber relationship came to a grinding halt. Patkin, Bennett and McPhee, having signed the Bar Roll in March 1971, were all offered rooms in Owen Dixon Chambers. However, the Victorian Bar had taken the fourth floor of Equity Chambers. I was given the choice of the rooms on the fourth floor so I took a large room looking out on to Bourke Street.

In March 1974 a new list was formed and a number of barristers on the new list – Muir’s – joined me on the fourth floor of Equity Chambers. A young barrister on our floor, Ian Sutherland, was double-booked and offered me a brief in the Magistrates’ Court. I grabbed it with both hands. It was from one of the leading solicitor’s firms in Melbourne – Corrs.

A young solicitor from that firm, Christopher Wren, came along with the client, a ruddy-faced little Jewish man. Yes, his Jewishness is relevant because he was discriminating against me because of my colour. His face was a feature when he saw me. He asked me what I knew about the law. I pointed to my certificate hanging on the wall and told him that I took a Second-Class Honours at Cambridge University and had qualified as a barrister in England in 1959, some 15 years before.

I studied his complaint, which disclosed that his neighbour had bulldozed his boundary wall with a tractor. The claim had been brought in negligence. I told Chris that it would have been preferable if it had been brought in trespass because it was strict liability. He would only have to prove that his neighbour bulldozed his fence, but in negligence he would have to prove a duty of care on the part of the neighbour.

The client started screaming and yelling at me at the top of his voice: “What the hell are you talking about? Trespass, negligence, what the hell does it matter? My fence has been demolished. You are just like my neighbour. You don’t know what you’re doing’

By this time I had had enough. Corrs may be the one of the biggest firms in Melbourne and I needed them. I was only two years at the Bar and no one in his right mind would insult a client of Corrs, but I was not going to put up with this nasty little racist man. I picked up the brief and threw it at him, saying, “Take your brief and bugger off.” I never got another brief from Corrs.

In January, we spent a happy day with Louis Voumard at his holiday home in Mt Martha. I am proud to say that I am one of the few members of the Victorian Bar who has been to Lou’s holiday home in Mt Martha and to his home in Kew. The months then flew by and I remember that fateful day – Thursday, May 2, 1974. We were chatting in his room that afternoon when the evening shadows slowly closed in, and we went on chatting until about seven at night. Lou drew me aside and told me, “My boy, this book is killing me.” He added, “I am very, very tired” We said our goodbyes and he left – and I was never to see him again.

On Friday morning something made me go down to see Lou. I found his room closed with a notice saying that he was ill and that he would not be coming in that day. I telephoned his home and Susan answered the phone. She told me, “Dad walked down to see his doctor in the High Street. He was having a pain in his chest and thought he had better see his doctor about it.” The silly old man had walked a mile to see his doctor when he was obviously having a heart attack.

I went into work on Monday morning and was reading The Age newspaper when the telephone rang. It was my friend Ronny de Kretser. He said, “Nimal, have you seen today’s papers?”

“Yes, but I’ve been reading the sports page”

He told me to turn to page two. I did so, and found there a huge appreciation of the life of the late Mr Louis Voumard who had died the previous Saturday, May 4. I sat there stunned. I was in a state of shock: my whole world had collapsed around me. The only dear friend I had known and would ever know in Australia had died. Who was going to help me? Whom could I turn to? I put the phone down, put my hands on my head and sat there sobbing softly. What was to become of me?

But then, as Benny Hill was wont to say, “The pickled pinger of pate intervened.” During the previous year in Equity Chambers and my close friendship with my dear friend Lou, I had also become very friendly with his secretary, Kathy Scheinman. Dear sweet Kathy was responsible for my second real break at the Victorian Bar, Noel Rice having been the first. She wrote off to the powers-that-be at Law Book Company and told them that a young man had been helping Louis Voumard with his book when he died.

The managing director, Tony Lees, wrote to me and asked whether I could take over writing the work. Tony then flew down to Melbourne, interviewed me and retained me to write “THE BOOK” I was terrified. I knew nothing about the sale of land, let alone land law.

I decided to take a chance and do the work. I telephoned my friend, John Rutherford, who was a solicitor at Cook and Cussen. He came down to see me with a contract for the sale of land and took me through the essential requirements of a contract. He also explained to me the purpose of requisitions on title and spent a couple of hours initiating me in the mysteries of land law.

This is the truth. Well, what was I to do with Voumard? I read Voumard from cover to cover 40 times during the next four years. I remember going to Italy for a holiday in 1977 and I read Voumard going over on the plane once, then read it again coming back on the plane.

The editing of the third edition of this work was in the hands of Sir Alistair Adam. I gave Sir Alistair what I thought were the relevant authorities. My knowledge of property law was non-existent, despite my having read this work so many times. As a result of my lack of knowledge, I omitted to give Sir Alistair the controversial decision of the House of Lords on part performance – The case of Steadman v. Steadman. Ross Sundberg QC reviewed this third edition and crucified my work. I was heartbroken.

(To be continued)

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Features

Odds and Ends: Horse racing and the business of sports betting – IV

Published

15 hours ago

2026/09/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Prof. C. A. Saliya
(The fourth instalment in a five-part series on
the business of gambling, legal and illegal)

Here’s a puzzle worth thinking about. For well over a century, Sri Lankan law has treated a village card game as a criminal offence, punishable by fine or imprisonment. In that same period, it has treated betting on horse racing as a perfectly legitimate, taxable business, one the state has actively collected revenue from for generations, under a Horse Racing Betting Ordinance older than most of the country’s other gambling law. Same basic activity, risking money on an uncertain outcome, one version illegal since 1889, the other legal the entire time.

Why? Follow the money, and the class lines, back to the colonial era. Horse racing arrived in Ceylon as a pastime of the British administrative and planter class, a “sport,” played and watched at clubs and racecourses, with betting bolted on as a respectable, even sophisticated, accompaniment. Card games played by ordinary people in villages, on the other hand, were exactly the kind of activity the same colonial authorities were eager to label a vice and criminalise. It’s the same pattern we saw with casinos in Part 2: gambling done by the wealthy tends to get called a sport, a tradition, or an investment. Gambling done by everyone else tends to get called a crime.

That history matters, but the economics of horse racing betting matter just as much, because once you understand how a bookmaker actually prices a race, you understand something that applies to almost every form of sports betting on Earth, from a Colombo racecourse to a global football sportsbook.

How a bookmaker guarantees a profit

Imagine a simple race with only two horses running, and imagine, just for the sake of the maths, that both horses genuinely have an exactly 50-50 chance of winning. A perfectly fair bookmaker, offering perfectly fair odds, would price both horses at even money: bet 100 rupees, win 100 rupees plus your stake back, on either horse.

No real bookmaker does this. Instead, they’ll price both horses slightly below their true odds, say, offering odds that imply each horse has a 55 percent chance of winning, even though the true chance is only 50 percent. Add those two implied percentages together and you get 110 percent, not 100. That extra 10 percent is called the “overround,” or sometimes the “vig” (short for vigorish), and it is the bookmaker’s guaranteed margin, built directly into the prices on the board before a single horse leaves the starting gate. It doesn’t matter which horse wins. The bookmaker’s overround wins regardless, on every single race, all day, every day.

There’s a second, subtler effect that decades of studying racing data has confirmed again and again, all over the world: bettors as a group are slightly too generous to favourites and slightly too generous to long-shots. Favourites tend to win a bit more often than their odds suggest they should, meaning betting on the favourite loses you money slightly more slowly than average over the long run, while betting on the rank outsider, the 50-to-1 shot that everyone secretly dreams will come in, loses you money considerably faster than average, because the public consistently overpays for that lottery-ticket dream. Bookmakers know this. It’s baked into their pricing, and it has a name: the favourite-longshot bias.

It’s not just horses anymore

Horse racing used to be the flagship product of the entire betting industry. It still matters enormously, including here in Sri Lanka, where it remains one of the very few genuinely legal betting products, but globally, its share of the total betting market has shrunk as sports betting on football, cricket, tennis and everything else has exploded, especially since a landmark 2018 United States Supreme Court ruling opened the door to state-by-state legal sports betting across America.

The newest and, frankly, most dangerous evolution of all this is “in-play” or “live” betting, placing bets not before a match starts, but continuously, in real time, on what happens in the next five minutes: the next corner, the next wicket, the next point. Regulators studying gambling harm consistently find that in-play betting produces worse outcomes fo bettors than traditional pre-match betting, precisely because there are so many more moments to place a bet, so much less time to think between decisions, and so much more opportunity to chase a loss five minutes after you made it.

Where the skill actually is, and isn’t

Now, a confession from this column, which has spent plenty of ink over the years analysing racecards: professional handicapping, studying trainer and jockey form, course and distance records, the draw, the going, the weight a horse is carrying, is a genuinely real skill, and it can meaningfully improve your chances of picking a winner compared to a random guess. That’s not a myth. Good handicapping works, in the narrow sense that it improves your odds of identifying the horse most likely to win any given race.

But “improving your odds of picking a winner” and “beating the house edge” are two completely different things, and this is the single most important distinction in this entire series. Even the sharpest, most statistically literate handicapper in the country is still betting into odds that already have the bookmaker’s overround baked in. Skill can narrow the gap. It essentially never closes it completely over the long run, for the simple reason that the house built the gap on purpose, and prices every race to make sure it stays open.

When the “form” is fake: Virtual meetings

One genuinely strange wrinkle worth flagging here: some betting products dress themselves up in the full costume of horse racing, trainer names, jockey silks, past form lines, even fake race commentary, while actually being nothing more than a random number generator behind the scenes, deciding the winner with no horses, no trainers, and no real race involved at all; just a computer simulation.

These “virtual racing” products exist specifically to borrow the credibility that real handicapping has earned over more than a century, and apply it to something that has no skill element whatsoever, chance and chance alone. It’s worth knowing the difference, because the two products look almost identical on a betting slip, and only one of them rewards the kind of analysis this column has always tried to teach.

Are manipulations possible?

Bookmakers don’t secretly insert horses into races to beat favorites instead they simply publish odds based on form and betting demand. The real risk comes from insiders with knowledge, such as trainers or syndicates, who can exploit undervalued horses to stage betting coups. These events are rare but welldocumented, leaving a lasting mark on regulation. In the past, bookmakers were reactive, allowing coups to succeed before odds adjusted. Today, they are far more proactive, using AI systems and integrity units to detect anomalies quickly. Even so, insider coups still occur, though they are rarer and swiftly investigated. The balance has shifted: bookmakers now lose less often, but punters continue to chase “value” in overlooked horses, keeping the contest alive between house margins and human ingenuity.

Betting Coups: When the Odds Tilt

Horse racing has always carried a mystique of glamour and risk, but behind the silks and starting gates lies a business model designed to ensure bookmakers never lose. As explained earlier, the “overround”, that invisible margin built into every price, guarantees profit before the first horse even breaks stride. Yet history shows that punters, syndicates, and insiders have occasionally turned the tables, staging coups that shook the industry and exposed its vulnerabilities. Timeline of such incidents are shown in the Table.

These stories remind us that while bookmakers build their margins into every race, the human element, ambition, deception, or sheer audacity, can still disrupt the system. Today’s safeguards, from AIdriven monitoring to integrity units, make coups rarer, but not impossible. And that tension between certainty and surprise is precisely what keeps the public fascinated. Horse racing is not just about speed and stamina; it is about the eternal contest between the house edge and human ingenuity.

The road ahead for racing in Sri Lanka

Horse racing’s legal status in Sri Lanka looks set to remain intact under the new Gambling Regulatory Authority, folded alongside casinos and licensed online sports betting operators. What’s new is that offshore online platforms, which have long taken bets from Sri Lankan customers without local approval, are now—at least on paper—being brought under the same regulatory umbrella as the racecourse. Whether this shift results in genuine oversight or simply adds a licence requirement that foreign operators quietly ignore remains an open question, one to be explored in the final instalment of this series as we assess what fair, joinedup gambling regulation would truly require.

Next week:

Part 5, the final instalment, Closing the Book, on what real gambling reform would look like, and whether Sri Lanka’s new law gets us there.

(Prof. C. A. Saliya, is a charted accountant, academic, researcher and former banker. He is the author of SAMAJA GAVESHAKAYA and Springer Publication DOING SOCIAL RESEARCH. He can be contacted at saliya.ca@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the organisations with which he is affiliated.)

Features

When slogans meet scrutiny

Published

15 hours ago

2026/09/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

An unhealthy politics still rents the finished war — and that is why society stays divided

by Mahil Dole
Senior Superintendent of
Police (Retd.)

True national stability requires a transition this country has postponed for seventeen years: from a military victory to civic reforms that penalise divisive actors and build a unified identity. Last week showed, with unusual clarity, why that transition keeps failing. It was not a failure of slogans. It was a failure of consistency. Democracy, in the narrow sense of ballots and benches, is still standing. What is unhealthy is the use to which those ballots and benches are put. An unhealthy politics does not close a war. It rents it.

Three scenes, one week

In Chavakachcheri, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake told a housing gathering that racism would not be tolerated in any form, against Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims, in the North, South or East. He named the old kindling: heritage sites and religious places still used to ignite tension. He spoke of houses for the displaced and a stadium for children in Jaffna. Those are the right words for a head of State. A country that meant them would be doing the unglamorous work of peace: making the next generation less useful to anyone who needs a quarrel.

In Anuradhapura, on an SLPP stage, a different performance was under way. Jaffna Member of Parliament Archchuna Ramanathan referred to himself as a “Tiger” and to the elected President as a “fox”. The name of a proscribed organisation was spoken in a town that carries the memory of the sacred-city attack. Party figures who have spent years treating any mention of the LTTE as contamination were reported to have cheered. By Monday a civil-society group styling itself the “Joint Opposition” had taken a complaint to the CID. The Police confirmed receipt. Opposition voices had already raised the alarm on Sunday.

Let the record be exact, because the rumour was not. The complaint now on the CID file is that remarks on an SLPP stage, and the cheer that met them, crossed from political insult toward promotion of a banned group. The government, for its part, has said there is no room for LTTE promotion and that remembrance of the dead is another matter. Those are two different files. Mixing them is itself a kind of politics.

A third voice belonged to the same week. Professor Savitri Goonesekere spoke with the clarity that public law, when it is still a discipline and not a campaign colour, can still produce: thoughtful, articulate, addressed to the country rather than to a faction. The speech deserves the praise it has received. The caution it invites is as important as the praise. Worthy slogans, unity, an end to racism, one law for all, are easily hijacked. They are most easily hijacked by those whose own conduct is under scrutiny, and who need the language of virtue more than they need the discipline of it. A speech of that quality raises the standard. It does not lower the duty to watch who picks the slogan up next.

What an unhealthy democracy does

People vote. Governments change. Parliament sits. That is not a failed democracy in the textbook sense. It is also not a healthy one. A healthy system converts a military victory into civic rules that bind the winners as well as the defeated, and that make division expensive. An unhealthy system keeps the war useful. It farms fear. It treats identity as a turnout machine. It issues a guarantee against racism in one district and applauds a banned name in another. That practice is not a lapse of taste. It is a structural reason society remains split.

Duplicity is the method. The same platform that built a career on the defeat of terrorism can, when the arithmetic of a rally requires it, tolerate the self-description of a Tiger. The same voices that demand a ban on LTTE propaganda can discover, the following week, that a rival’s meeting is the real offence. The same guarantee against racism can be issued in the North on one day and left unenforced in the South on the next. Two standards, again — not between Colombo and an overseas capital this time, but between the microphone and the statute book.

The LTTE remains a proscribed organisation. That is law, not a mood. Remembrance of the dead is a human act and must be protected as such. Glorification of the organisation that killed them is not remembrance. A serious State draws that line once, publishes it, and applies it without regard to who is speaking and which party owns the stage. Selective outrage is not law enforcement. It is campaigning.

The same is true of the word “racism”. No President can abolish it by declaring that he will not tolerate it. The declaration is necessary. It is not sufficient. Racism in this country has rarely been only a private vice. It has been a public business model: a way to harvest fear, postpone reform, and keep a constituency enlisted after the guns fell silent. Heritage sites and religious places become kindling because someone lights them. Universities become martyr theatres because someone books the hall. A Member of Parliament can call himself a Tiger on a southern stage because someone calculated that the cheer would be louder than the cost.

Why this divides a people

Division is not produced only by the last war and not only by those who live outside the island. It is produced, week by week, by a politics that cannot address a crowd except through Sinhala, Tamil or Muslim injury. A politics of that kind is not representing a community. It is farming one. The young, who have no memory of the last bunker, inherit the quarrel instead of a country. Serving officers watch the treatment of their predecessors and the theatre of their politicians and draw a rational conclusion about what the country values. Families who lost their own to the LTTE hear “Tiger” cheered and conclude that their dead have been repriced. Families who lost their own to the State hear a pledge against racism and wait to see whether the pledge runs south as well as north.

That is how an interval is mistaken for peace. The guns are silent. The inventory is not. “Tiger” and “traitor”, “racist” and “patriot”, remain stock in trade. So long as those words pay, in applause, in airtime, in a complaint that wounds an opponent, someone will keep them in circulation. Professor Goonesekere’s warning sits exactly there. Leadership means going beyond rhetoric. The law is not written for those who already respect it. It is written for those who violate it. When violation carries no cost, the slogan itself becomes a form of impunity.

What civic reform would actually look like

The work is unglamorous, which is why it is avoided. First, equal enforcement. If the organisation is proscribed, the prohibition travels with the speaker. An SLPP stage in Anuradhapura and a commemoration in the North are not two legal systems. The CID complaint now on the file should be treated as a test of that rule, not as a trophy for whoever lodged it.

Second, an end to ethnic first-identity as an electoral method. A civic identity, Sri Lankan first, faith and language held without being turned into a passport, will not appear by exhortation. It appears when the dividend for division falls and the dividend for competence rises.

Third, a cost for lighting kindling. Heritage sites and religious places are not campaign props. Universities are not martyr calendars. Media that carry a charge must carry the correction. Records that hold an untested allegation must not shadow a working life after the allegation has failed.

Fourth, one standard for those who served the State and those who fought it. Wrongdoers on every side belong in a court, not in a diplomatic weather system and not in a rally chant. Collective punishment of a profession is not accountability. A cheer for a banned name is not unity. A slogan against racism is not a policy until it binds the speaker’s own side.

None of this requires a new brand of commission. It requires a State that stops allowing division to be a career. South Africa’s imperfect bargain at least tried to bind both sides inside one process. Colombia wrote one jurisdiction for guerrillas, paramilitaries and State forces. We have preferred two international ledgers and a third, domestic one on which the war is rented out by the evening. Last week’s scenes, a guarantee in Chavakachcheri, a cheer in Anuradhapura, a serious speech that must not be stolen, are not opposites. They are the same unfinished settlement, spoken in three registers.

The President’s sentence should be kept, and then made expensive to break. Professor Goonesekere’s standard should be kept, and then applied to those who clap for it. Racism will not be defeated by a rally, and a proscribed organisation will not be dissolved by a complaint. They will be reduced only when the State, and the parties that live off the State, stop treating the finished war as inventory. True national stability is not the memory of a victory. It is the construction of a civic order that no longer needs that victory to be refought, in Anuradhapura or in Geneva, in order for someone to remain relevant.

The writer is a retired Senior Superintendent of Police who served in intelligence and counter-terrorism. He is the author of Security Beyond Enforcement: Practical Approaches for a Safer Nation. This column is a stand-alone extension of an earlier argument on two standards in one conflict. Views expressed are his own.

Features

Defend civic space upon which peace is built

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Jehan Perera

International Peace Day was observed on 21 September. It finds Sri Lanka with a genuine achievement to record and a demanding test to meet. The UN’s theme this year was “Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.” It also honoured the “everyday architects of peace”—people driving local action and building a lasting peace from the ground up. In the 2026 Global Peace Index, Sri Lanka rose 30 places, from 97th to 67th among 163 countries. Over the same period, global peacefulness declined for the twelfth consecutive year to its lowest level since the index began, and South Asia suffered the sharpest regional deterioration. The test is whether the government will protect the civic space in which those architects of peace work.

Sri Lanka’s improvement is real and deserves acknowledgement. In this year’s review, issued a few weeks ago, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights acknowledged progress in the form of action against corruption, arrests and investigations linked to political killings, enforced disappearances and the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, and continued official denunciation of racism. A ranking, however, records conditions at a particular moment. It does not guarantee that they will last. Sustainable peace will depend on three factors. These are whether the government addresses the unresolved causes of conflict, whether it strengthens accountability for past and present abuses, and whether it protects the civic space in which peace is built from below. On the first two the record is incomplete. On the third, the draft NGO law threatens to weaken the very organisations that press for the other two.

What holds Sri Lanka back from a higher place are the same things that fed the war at home and also feed international conflict that rages elsewhere in the world. These are racism or ethnic nationalism that is narrow-focused, corruption and lawlessness. Equality, accountability and the rule of law are their remedies. The present government has committed itself to these, and is a significant improvement over governments of the recent past. But these pillars are not held up by governments alone. Peace is made in villages, workplaces and university campuses. It is made by families who insist on the truth about their disappeared, by journalists and lawyers who expose abuse, and by community organisations that bring Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese into practical cooperation.

Unfinished Work

The UN High Commissioner’s report to the current Human Rights Council session, covering October 2025 to July 2026, shows how much remains to be done. The Prevention of Terrorism Act is still being applied, producing arbitrary arrests and long detention without charge. The report calls for a moratorium pending repeal and for the release of long-term detainees. Military-occupied land has not been released, memorialisation lacks support, and tensions over land and religious sites persist. The Batticaloa district illustrates how such problems endure. In the past three years, two Presidents, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, have visited and instructed that the dispute over grazing land in Mailaththamadu and Mathavanai be resolved. It is a dispute between Tamil cattle farmers and outside Sinhala cultivators, and it has not been resolved. When two Presidents issue instructions and nothing changes, the fault lies in the machinery of State. An unresolved dispute does not stand still. It hardens into the next grievance.

Accountability shows the same pattern. The report documents torture and deaths in custody, and surveillance and intimidation of activists, journalists and civil society. Serious cases remain stalled for years, among them the killing of seventeen aid workers of Action Contre la Faim in Muttur two decades ago. Sharper still is the case of the Eastern University refugee camp at Vantharamoolai, where in 1990 the army took away 158 persons in a single day. They were never seen again. The camp’s officer-in-charge, Dr T. Jayasingam, later Vice Chancellor of the university, identified the officers responsible. More than three decades on, those officers have not been questioned. These cases are still remembered because families, survivors and independent witnesses have refused to let them be forgotten. Meanwhile several commissions of inquiry have completed their investigations but nothing further has happened.

What South Africa, Argentina and other post-conflict societies have found indispensable are four pillars of what is called “Transitional Justice” which are truth, accountability, reparations and non-recurrence. In Sri Lanka’s circumstances, truth means credible, independent investigation of what happened to the disappeared, and support for memorialisation. Accountability means prosecuting Muttur, Vantharamoolai and comparable cases, and removing credibly accused persons from senior office. Reparations mean compensation for victims and the return of military-held land. Non-recurrence means repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act, releasing those held under it in the meantime, and resolving local disputes such as Mailaththamadu before delay hardens them. A country that buries its past does not escape it. The past returns in the next generation.

Civil Society

It is against this background that the draft NGO law is most troubling. The proposed legislation contains sweeping provisions for State oversight and control of civil society organisations. Among these are enforcing a licensing requirement on NGOs, which is to be renewed every three years, and severe penalties for not submitting reports on time, or for spending on emergency flood relief (for instance) when the NGOs mandate is peacebuilding (as an example) with possible sanctions including deregistration and having to shut down. Civil society groups have warned that it would confer excessive discretion over their registration and operations. Officials in Sri Lanka have abused such powers in the past. Additional power without effective checks invites further abuse. Sound regulation would have clear criteria for registration, an independent registrar and a right of appeal to the courts. What cannot be justified is a regime in which registration becomes a licence to be withheld from organisations that scrutinise policy, expose abuses or advocate for the rights of citizens.

Democracy is based on checks and balances. Those who press for accountability are part of those checks. The contradiction is plain. A government that has pledged accountability, equality and the rule of law ought not to be preparing to weaken the very organisations that press for their fulfilment. The organisations most exposed are those working on disappearances, land, memorialisation and reconciliation in the North and East, where the State’s record is weakest and the need for independent witnesses greatest. Silencing them would not remove the grievances they document. It would remove the channel through which those grievances are addressed peacefully. The government appears to be relenting, which is welcome, but a pause is not a withdrawal. The bill should be withdrawn and any replacement drafted in genuine consultation with those it would govern.

Investment in peace as called for by the UN in its International Peace Day theme implies commitment over time, with returns that come slowly. Sri Lanka’s 30-place rise on the Global Peace Index is a first dividend and nothing more. It can be built upon only if the government matches its commitments with action: withdrawing or fundamentally redrafting the NGO law, repealing or suspending the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and bringing Muttur, Vantharamoolai and Mailaththamadu to resolution. A higher place in a global index is not a certificate of success. Sri Lanka’s higher ranking is an encouraging start, but it will endure only if the space in which citizens speak, question and organise is protected. Peace is built from below, and a government that is serious about it will treat civil society as a partner rather than a threat.