"Constitutional Entrenchment of Minority Rights in the 1978 Sri Lankan Constitution: A Doctrinal and Comparative Analysis"
Bibliographic record
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 power-sharing mechanisms as pathways toward durable constitutional pluralism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | medium |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".