ABSTRACT
Sri Lanka, a former British colony, is one of South Asia’s most established democracies. It was the first British colonial territory in which elections under universal suffrage were held prior to independence in 1931, 1936 and in 1947 (Silva 2000: 48).The military has never been deemed a serious threat to civilian government and has kept on the periphery of the public policy-making arena. However, despite its democratic tradition, since 1971 Sri Lanka has been under emergency rule1 for longer than it has been under democratic rule. The SinhalaTamil ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka climaxed in 1983 into a civil war. This civil war has already claimed 65,000 lives and displaced more than 670,000 people from their homes (Herath 2002). For a systematic presentation, this chapter is further organized into three parts, i.e. the Sri Lankan parliament in its political context, the historical evolution of the parliamentary committee system in Sri Lanka and the formal arrangement of committee system and its real-world implications in calling the government to account.
