JHU slams Hakeem’s racist policies

The Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) has lambasted Minister of Justice, Rauff Hakeem’s interventions in the legal education system as an attempt to bring about the ‘Muslimization’ of the legal sphere, adding that this insidious plan was a conspiracy on the part of the Minister.

JHU National Organizer and Media Spokesman Nishantha Sri Warnasinghe added that the Minister’s racist policies had not only affected the handing over of positions at the Ministry of Justice, but also interfered with the appointment of Justice of the Peace positions.

They state that a sector that needs to be extremely just, founded on principles of equality and fairness, should not be given to a racist politician.

While highlighting the fact that the controversy surrounding the Law College Entrance Examination, the rules of which had been tampered with to allow for the accommodation of a higher number of Muslim students, the process they add has also been fraught with continuous corruption and various irregularities. As a solution to the problems the Law College admitted 557 students in 2012.

What this succeeded in achieving was that instead of an adequate investigation into the irregularities being conducted, the Sinhalese students who faced injustice were also allowed in. This time around, for the year 2013, the decision taken in 2012 has been completely overturned with the number of students being enrolled drastically cut, where instead of the generally accepted number of 225 or 250, only 177 students have become eligible.

The average number of students taken is 288. The persons at the receiving end of this injustice are the Sinhalese students, states Warnasinghe, as except for the years 2011 and 2012 in which the entrance exams were embroiled in corruption and irregularities, in all other years the majority who passed the exam were the Sinhalese and thus denying the Sinhalese their well earned allotment by almost halving the number of students taken per annum and also obtaining an unfair advantage for the Muslims through entrance exam irregularities is despicable.

According to the present syllabus of the Law College, since the Entrance Exam is the final exam to be held within the confines of the current syllabus, students who suffered injustice at the Law College Entrance Exam, will not be permitted to sit for the exam again according to the present syllabus. The protocol in such cases is to allow for as many students as possible to enter the system, prior to changing the syllabus.

“In the 2013 syllabus, the ‘Background of Law’ subject exam has been distorted and now in the 2014 syllabus we find that it has been completely removed. Exam results were kept hidden for months only to be finally relegated to the Law College entrance gate instead of being disseminated to the public domain. A baseless age limit of 30 years has been enforced. All this happened after Hakeem came into the fray.

Compared to all other years, in 2012 there was an exponential and unbelievable increase in the number of Muslim students being eligible. There have been irregularities in the marking scheme and in the marking of papers. How did this happen? There is a hidden agenda here. We call for an immediate independent inquiry into these injustices and human rights violations,” Warnasinghe said.

(Courtesy : Ceylon Today)