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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The speaker of Sri Lanka’s Parliament urged the country’s president on Sunday to safeguard the rights of the sacked prime minister amid a deepening political crisis in the South Asian island nation.
Speaker Karu Jayasuriya said in a letter to President Maithripala Sirisena that the continued suspension of Parliament would have “serious and undesirable consequences.”
Sirisena dismissed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his Cabinet on Friday and replaced him with former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa. Wickremesinghe has asserted that he could prove his majority support in Parliament.
On Saturday, Sirisena suspended Parliament in an apparent move to give Rajapaksa time to try to muster enough support to survive any no-confidence vote.
Opposition lawmakers, supporting the new prime minister, asked Wickremesinghe to vacate his official residence or face a forcible eviction.
Hundreds of Wickremesinghe supporters continued to gather outside his official home on Sunday for the second consecutive day, waving party flags and denouncing Sirisena and Rajapaksa. Buddhist monks performed religious rites to invoke blessings on Wickremesinghe.
Jayasuriya said in the letter that he received “a request to protect the rights and privileges” of Wickremesinghe “until any other person emerges from within Parliament as having secured the confidence of Parliament.” He said the request came from two senior lawmakers from the sacked prime minister’s party.
“This request is especially important in the context where various persons are reported to have issued threats via the media,” Jayasuriya said, adding that “the forcible takeovers” would have “serious international implications.”
Tensions have been building between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe for some time, as the president did not approve of some of the economic reforms being introduced by the prime minister. Sirisena was also critical of investigations into military personnel accused of human rights violations during Sri Lanka’s long civil war, which ended in 2009.
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