SEMI-PRESIDENTIALISATION AND EXECUTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY: A CAUTIONARY TALE FROM SRI LANKA TO THE UK

Even within the executive and legislature, the public generally holds heightened expectations for the democratic accountability of members of the executive, led by the President or the Prime Minister depending on the institutional regime type, and members of the government. [...] These gradations of accountability expected from the executive, the MPs of the governing party and the MPs of the opposition produce the intra-branch mechanisms of accountability within the legislature as well as inter- branch accountability between the executive and the legislature. [...] JR Jayawardena, who led the process of enacting this constitution, and became the first executive President under this system, was of the firm view that ‘in a developing country the executive should be stable and not dependent on the whims and fancies of the House.’50 What the drafters of the Sri Lankan Constitution were dismissing as ‘whims and fancies of the House’ were in fact the mechanisms of. [...] However, in the semi-presidential system, the President is separate from the Parliament, and therefore, the Parliament cannot act as a check on the President and the government in the way which the UK parliamentary system did. [...] A four-judge majority of the Supreme Court held with the petitioners that the violation of the public trust doctrine, which requires the representatives to exercise public powers for the public benefit, was undermined by the actions of these figures during the crisis of 2022 and that this was a violation of the fundamental right to equality.