Crushing defeat for move against Bar chief

Pro-establishment 'G100' lawyers get only 169 votes for motion to censure Leong.

KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian Bar, rallying around their outgoing president, has resoundingly crushed an attempt by pro-establishment lawyers to censure Christopher Leong for critical remarks about a court judgement.

After several hours of debate at the Bar Council’s annual meeting being held here, 1,194 members voted against the motion, with only 169 in favour. Two lawyers abstained.

The motion, proposed by Faidhur Abdul Hadi and seconded by Aidil Khalid, had demanded that Leong make a public apology for supposedly disparaging the judiciary and bringing the judiciary into contempt, and for supposedly misleading the Bar.

The two are part of the so-called G100 group of mainly pro-establishment lawyers who describe themselves as non-partisan.

After the vote, a spokesman for G100, former MAS chairman Aziz Abdul Rahman, said the group hoped that that the attorney-general or the police would take notice of their belief that Leong had disparaged the judiciary. “It is up to the authorities now to decide whether there’s a contempt of court in Leong’s statement,” he said, according to Star Online.

The G100 had wanted Leong to retract a press statement bearing the title “Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim: Prosecuted or persecuted?” issued in response to a decision by the Federal Court to uphold the conviction and jailing of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on a charge of sodomy.

Another motion demanded that the Bar withdraw a resolution sponsored by Leong that called for the abolition of the Sedition Act.

In the Anwar judgement press statement, Leong had said that there was a perception that Anwar had been persecuted, which had been fuelled by “glaring anomalies”, such as the failure of the prosecution to charge the complainant Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan for consensual sex.

Aziz was quoted as saying: “The majority of the members have voted in favour of the president and the president had also said he never committed contempt of court. He said he was only insulting the prosecution team, but we did not agree with him because he made the statement after the verdict was made.”

Earlier today the Bar had withdrawn a motion that had sought to censure Umno lawyer Mohd Shafee Abdullah for taking part in a series of public ceramah about the Anwar sodomy case and for making public portions of testimony given behind closed-doors.

The motion had sought to refer Shafeee to a disciplinary committee. On Friday, Shafee obtained a court injunction to prevent the motion being debated, and a court hearing will be held on the matter on March 27.