Respect 25 percent quota allocated to women | Daily News
Rosy tells Election Commission:

Respect 25 percent quota allocated to women

Colombo Mayoral Elect Rosy Senanayake yesterday called on the Election Commission to abide by the 25 percent quota allocated to women in the recent Local Government elections.

On February 10 this year the country went to vote with the clear expectation that for the first time in the history of Sri Lanka, a minimum of 25 percent of their council members would be women, she stated in a release to the media yesterday.

“To now say that this minimum 25 percent of women council members could not be implemented, is disingenuous and in bad faith”.

The minimum 25 percent quota is clear both from the letter of the law and the intentions of those who drafted it and the Parliament that passed it. Neither the Commission of Elections nor the Political Parties should consider adhering to this law to be “unfair” or “burdensome.”

The law cannot be set aside nor the clear intent of the law be defeated just because some Parties now have to nominate more women from their Lists than they expected to. To disregard the law would not only be discriminatory towards women but also circumvent the democratic process and the expectations of the electorate, said the former Parliamentarian.

She stressed that the law was not open to interpretation and that under the Ordinance, a minimum of 10 percent of nominees from each political party for election through the Ward system has to be women while a minimum of 50 percent of nominees on the separate additional persons List of each party has also to be women.

This formulation was put together with the sole aim of ensuring that a minimum of 25 percent of the members in each and every Council are women, she added.

“In future, it is necessary to amend the law to further clarify the details of how exactly women members are allocated by each political party in different circumstances in order to ensure the 25 percent minimum of women members, I will fully engage with and support that process. In the meantime, the Commission of Elections and the Political Parties are under both a legal and moral obligation to implement the current law and ensure that all Councils are constituted with a minimum of 25 percent of women members and I strongly urge them to do so without delay, she further said.

 

 


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