A.M.Saajith Ahamed has posted Constitutional Entrenchment of Minority Rights in the 1978 Sri Lankan Constitution: A Doctrinal and Comparative Analysis on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This study critically examines the entrenchment of minority rights within the 1978 Second Republican Constitution of Sri Lanka through a doctrinal and comparative lens. It traces the historical trajectory from the Soulbury Constitution (1947), which contained explicit safeguards such as Section 29(2), to the First Republican Constitution (1972), which abolished them, culminating in the 1978 Constitution’s semi-presidential framework. While the 1978 text introduced fundamental rights provisions, language recognition, and devolution through Provincial Councils, its structural features-including the executive presidency, the primacy of Buddhism, and the unitary state clause-systematically undermined genuine entrenchment. Judicial interpretations, although occasionally expansive (e.g., Velmurugu), largely reflected restraint and deference to majoritarian dominance, exposing doctrinal gaps. A comparative analysis with India, Canada, South Africa, Malaysia, and the United States reveals that Sri Lanka’s entrenchment is “weak” or “illusory” when contrasted with robust constitutional frameworks that structurally safeguard pluralism. The paper argues that Sri Lanka’s constitutional design entrenched majoritarian supremacy rather than minority equality, contributing to ethnic polarization and conflict. It concludes by proposing a reconstructed model of entrenchment grounded in Rawlsian justice, Habermasian deliberative democracy, and multicultural constitutionalism, emphasizing explicit recognition of minority rights, stronger judicial authority, and hybrid powersharing mechanisms as pathways toward durable constitutional pluralism.