3. CONCLUDING REMARKS
As shown in the description above, the Conciliation Boards scheme might be said to have achieved a difficult but gradual development with all ideological and practical objections raised by various camps, until their power was further extended by an Act in 1975.108 However, a vital blow was struck against it soon after.
After the general election in July, 1977, the winning U.N.P. Cabinet led by Junius Jayawardena, who became the first executive President in 1978, carried out radical changes of state policies, including revision of the Constitution of Sri Lanka as passed in August and promulgated in September, 1978. The Conciliation Boards scheme was one among them in the earliest period of the Cabinet. By the use of the power prescribed in the Conciliation Boards Act itself the Minister of Justice issued, as early as within one month of the general election, an order to remove the Chairmen and Members of all the Conciliation Boards without appointing new Chairman and members instead. The function of the Conciliation Boards was thus forced to be suspended, leaving the Constitution Boards Act surviving as it had been. The excuse for such a drastic suspension was alleged to have been political corruption.accelerated by the Conciliation Boards scheme. (Cf. Marasinghe, 1980: 411)
The heated debates among different rationalizations for the Conciliation Boards scheme, and objections against the Boards aroused especially by lawyers and sometimes by judges, seem to have subsided to a calm. But of course it never meant that the idea embodied in the Conciliation Boards scheme was totally defeated. Rather, the fundamental problem underlying the ebb and flow of the Conciliation Boards could be seen as inseparably connected with a basic problem of Sri Lankan society in terms of law. As made clear in the above discussion, the institution of the Conciliation Boards was an appreciable result of an agreement among camps of different orientations. It should be evaluated as a success on one hand, insofar as different camps reached an agreement, but a failure on the other, in that they failed to reach a formal, reasonable, common understanding in both ideological rationalization and practical administration of the Boards sufficient to continue their function.