FROM SRI LANKA

...The speaker of the National Assembly, however, thought otherwise and announced that the Court had defaulted in its duty, and that the National Assembly could proceed to debate the Press Bill...

...According to reports in the international press early in February, a majority of the judges have voted that the proposed press law is in conflict with the Constitution...

...Enraged by this action, government supporters in the National Assembly abused the judges, and government spokesmen even called the speaker to bar the judges physically from the committee room of the National Assembly where the Court was sitting...

...The Court failed to conclude its hearings within the 14-day period mentioned in the new Constitution, which it ruled was not an obligatory provision but merely a standard toward which to aspire...

...it puts a journalist in the dilemma of having to reveal his source of information or go to jail...

...q COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...

...The Constitution provides for no such procedure and the judges, naturally, had rejected this face-saving proposal...

...In a brief announcement, the Court's president, T. S. Fernando (also president of the International Commission of Jurists), said that the judges were bound to uphold the new Constitution according to their understanding of it and that any other course of action would be an abdication of their duty...

...Such a provision is calculated to inhibit even the publication of truthful news (to admit to a bona fide mistake is no defense...

...subsequent developments are anyone's guess...

...The petitioners also claim that the Bill offends the principle of equality before the law, because government publications are immune from its provisions...

...A bill to control the press, recently introduced by the government, was accordingly referred to the Court at the demand of the opposition (the United National party), the civil rights movement, and other groups...

...Most alarming for the future of democratic institutions in Sri Lanka, however, was the revelation on the floor of the Assembly by the minister of justice that he, personally, had telephoned the judges to suggest they ask the speaker for an extension of time and that a midnight meeting of the president of the Republic, the judges, the minister of justice, and the speaker had taken place at which this suggestion was renewed...

...An attempt by its government—a coalition of left-nationalists and Trotskyists (LSSP)—to muzzle the press has plunged the six-monthold Republic of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) into the first crisis under its strange new Constitution...

...This Constitution established the Supreme Court, which is to advise the elected National Assembly whether proposed legislation will be in conflict with the Constitution...

...The petitioners alleged that the Bill contravenes freedom of the press which is guaranteed by the new Constitution, and 148 that newspapers now will be subject to a governmentdominanted "press council...

...A provision of the Press Bill making it an offense to publish a false statement about any proposal is under consideration by the government...