Executive Power in Times of Emergency: Executive Underreach and Overreach in Sri Lanka during COVID-19

Times of emergency have frequently raised concerns about a government’s misuse of power or inaction. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries around the world were experiencing democratic decline and the rise of authoritarianism. These pre-existing situations conditioned the nature of the executive response to the pandemic that followed. This report explores the ideas of executive overreach and underreach through a case study of the Sri Lankan government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The report first identifies how, since the 1990s, Sri Lanka experienced a constitutional reform rollercoaster with highs of democratic safeguards and checks on the power of the president, and lows of presidential aggrandisement and authoritarianism. Against this background, the report identifies the continuation of this trend and the ways it facilitated executive overreach and underreach that occurred during the pandemic. We identify several symptoms of executive overreach and underreach, including evading accountability, arbitrary decision-making, militarisation, discrimination and legal opportunism. We illustrate these symptoms through a range of case studies involving the president, the military and the administration. In doing so, we suggest that in Sri Lanka, executive overreach or underreach during the pandemic should not be seen as unusual but rather a continuation of executive aggrandisement, as typified by the constitutional reform rollercoaster with its rapid shifts from democratic accountability to authoritarianism and back again