An interim report is to be prepared on the legal frameworks governing elections in Sri Lanka, excluding provincial council elections, the Ministry of Public Administration, Provincial Councils and Local Government has said, according to NewsFirst.
Minister Prof. Chandana Abeyratne said the report will be prepared on the basis of views expressed by the public, political parties and other organisations.
The submissions have already reached Parliament
A special parliamentary committee was appointed to examine the legal frameworks governing elections and related matters. That committee invited public views on the existing election laws, and a report compiled from those submissions was presented to Parliament on Wednesday, the Minister said. The views received have been reviewed.
The exclusion of provincial council elections is the significant boundary in Thursday’s announcement. Those polls have been overdue for years and carry their own separate reform question — the delimitation and electoral-system dispute that has repeatedly held them up — and the Minister’s framing keeps that problem outside the interim exercise rather than folding it in.
Where this sits in a reform process now five months old
The work has moved in stages through this year. A 12-member parliamentary select committee on election laws was constituted in May and held its first meeting later that month. In June the committee opened public submissions, which ran to mid-July. In August an expert panel was appointed to review 31 electoral reform proposals.
Thursday’s announcement is the next step in that same sequence: the submissions are in, they have been compiled and tabled, and an interim report is now to be written from them.
Not reported
No deadline is given for the interim report, and the filing does not say whether it will be tabled in Parliament or published. It does not identify which laws the report will address, whether the Parliamentary Elections Act, the Local Authorities Elections Ordinance or the Presidential Elections Act are within scope, or how many public submissions were received. One sentence in the NewsFirst copy, describing the role of a panel of experts in the process, is corrupted in the published text and its meaning cannot be established. No other verified newsroom had reported the announcement at the time of writing.
