No reasonable independent minded person would countenance the recent outburst of the defence ministry website branding some lawyers appearing for the Sunday Leader newspaper in a contempt of court matter as ``traitors.’’ Very few people, if any, would endorse that newspaper’s comparison of Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa to the late unlamented LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran; most so at this point of time in our contemporary history when it is widely accepted that Rajapaksa’s exemplary and single-minded leadership played a significant role in finishing off the Tigers after three decades of war.

The fact that this unfortunate comparison was made in the face of the newspaper’s undertaking to court that it would not attack Rajapaksa during the pendency of an ongoing defamation case has now loaded a contempt of court charge on the Sunday Leader’s back. It is, of course, its democratic and legal right to defend itself of this charge and retain lawyers for this purpose as it has done. Whether there was contempt or not will be decided by court. It goes without saying that the lawyers who have been retained for the defence must do their best for their clients, in this case the editor and publishers of the Sunday Leader. To be branded traitors for doing this job, and that by a website of the defence ministry funded by the taxpayer, is totally unacceptable. A lawyer, after all, does not endorse what a guilty client may have done when he defends him. His role is to defend the accused to the best of his ability in the face of the evidence presented against him. As Opposition Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe pertinently pointed out, lawyers appeared for Somarama, Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s assassin. What was unsaid but implied there was that nobody, most so an organ of the state, accused them of being traitors. If there were no lawyers willing to accept Somarama’s brief, the state would have assigned counsel to defend him.

Given the controversy the intemperate reference in the website raised, it was inevitable that the matter came up in parliament as it did some days ago with former Speaker Joseph Michael Perera of the UNP raising it. It was Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake’s unenviable lot to respond to the matters raised. Wickremanayake who has studied law and served at the justice ministry in his long career, argued his case on the basis that the website was itself a part of the media enjoying the rights and responsibilities of the media vested in the media by the constitution which is the basic law of the land. Protecting these constitutional rights is the obligation of all citizen of the land whoever they be – ordinary people, lawyers, doctors, businessmen or whoever regardless of their profession or status in life. The premier invoked several articles of the constitution – Article 4 dealing with the exercise of sovereignty, 12 (1) which says that all persons are equal before the law and are entitled to equal protection before the law, and 14 providing for the freedom of speech and expression including publication.

This, of course, is well and good but the references to the constitution has dragged Wickremanayake into tricky ground due to the non-fidelity of the government of which he is prime minister to certain provisions of the country’s basic law relating specifically to the 13 and 17th Amendments. As Dr. A.C. Visvalingam, the President of the Citizens Movement for Good Governance (CIMOGG), an indefatigable campaigner in this cause, has pointed out in an article we publish today, the ``present government has blatantly and shamelessly violated both these Amendments for years without making any attempt to modify them or remove them altogether by constitutionally permitted means.’’ Adding salt to the wounds, he jogs the notoriously short memories of Sri Lankans by reminding that the 17th Amendment was unanimously passed by parliament in 2001, meaning that many of those currently sitting in the legislature supported it. But, as he puts it, they are now ``brazenly cooperating in its violation.’’ So are they also traitors?

As the prime minister said in his July 21 parliamentary speech, a lawyer upon enrolment to the profession swears an oath of fidelity to the constitution. He urged that the comparison between the defence secretary and the ``murderous Prabhakaran’’ was a treacherous act, which undoubtedly will be a widely held point of view. But the issue here is not whether the comparison was treacherous or not but whether the lawyers appearing for the newspaper which published it can be officially branded as traitors by a website of the defence ministry. Wickremanayake had said that regardless of who the transgressors were, whether they were lawyers, doctors or ordinary people, ``some may’’ regard them as guilty of treachery. He would be on safe ground had he left it at that – a matter of opinion with which some may agree while others may not. But he went on to say that the defence ministry’s web report was ``actually true.’’ That was totally unnecessary. Few would have objected to a two fisted attack on the comparison (between Gotabhaya Rajapapaks and Prabhakaran) with most, at least in their hearts and mind, cheering. But the same cannot be said of the ``traitor’’ label the website attached to the lawyers appearing for the editors and publisher of the Sunday Leader.