Malaysian courts getting bogged down with trivial matters

Instead of dealing with news breaking and major crime cases such as the Paul Phua gambling kingpin in the United States, or spend more time finding out the unknown motives behind the murder of Mongolian model Altantuya Sharibuu and the death of the young political aide Teoh Beng Hock, I have an uneasy feeling that our courts are getting bogged down with trivia.

Think about it. DAP lawmaker Teresa Kok’s controversial video ‘Onederful Malaysia’ took so much of the court’s time, and finally, the case is dropped. This is likely due to the new attorney-general Apandi Ali’s stand on the matter.

After sitting in the court listening to the case a year ago, I remember making a tongue-in-cheek remark: “How is the case so seditious that people are being charged in court? What if one of the panellists had been a fan of Rosmah that she behaved exactly like her?” After all, anyone using botox will have the same effects on the face.

From the legal fraternity, I learnt that Apandi himself had apparently stood down for a brief moment in a case involving the state government of Pahang and Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) for failing to install electricity to an Orang Asli community hall. Their old community hall had been bulldozed down by the local authorities.

Apandi was the then an Appeals Court judge. Credit to whom credit is due and based on the feedback that I received, Apandi was said to have told off the deputy public prosecutor and TNB, saying that the government of the day had promised to put the people first, yet it did not live up to its promises. I am assuming this was during Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s time.

Perhaps, this is the reason why Najib had failed badly to win the hearts of the Chinese during the last general election. He has himself to blame, instead of what Utusan Malaysia had whipped up just the next morning with the headline, ‘Apa Lagi Cina Mahu?’ (What else do the Chinese want?)

Most people were able to see through the hypocrisy of the government and I am sure people like P Waythamoorthy would have learnt it the hard way when he signed the memorandum on behalf of Hindraf.

And now, with the controversies surrounding the 1MDB, it is not only the Chinese who will be sceptical come the next general election - even Umno members, I believe, will vote for the opposition!

All the perception games that they are playing, for example, that only Umno can protect the Malay rights, is not working at all with the educated urban Malays. Meanwhile, the older generation of rural folk who used to support the Barisan Nasional will slowly pass on.

The younger generation of Malaysians are apparently leaning towards the opposition, which is why even if you put Garfield the Cat as the non-BN candidate in the last two general elections, Garfield would win! Such is the sentiment that I see in my fellow Malaysians today.

So many more cases

Goodness knows how many but there are just too many cases that have come to mind when we read the news every day where the court cases are trivial by comparison to murder cases, corruption and scandals running into the billions of ringgit, drug and human trafficking.

A good example is former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s Sodomy II case where it had been taken all the way to the apex court, and earned the Malaysian judiciary much discredit with international observers.

A whole book on it has also been written by Mark Trowell, entitled ‘The Prosecution of Anwar Ibrahim’. This may someday be turned into a film, which will further discredit our Barisan Nasional government. It is simply unwise for anyone in the ruling party to want such thing to happen, bearing in mind that it does not have to be a Malaysian production.

So why bother bringing a case of people’s preference, and face the ostracism worldwide that injustice may have been done to Anwar, a 68-year-old politician who has already changed the political landscape of this country since 1998?

There is also the case of a Melanau Christian, Jill Ireland, whose eight cheap CDs from Indonesia with praises to ‘Allah’ were confiscated by the Customs when she landed at the Low-Cost Carrier Terminal. In the end, the CDs had to be returned to her and someone had to fork out some pennies.

Of course, people who have been following the news would have also read about the manager of Borders, Nik Raina Nik Abdul Aziz, who was a Muslim employee, over a book sold by Borders. To me, this is ridiculous!

There are also other cases involving individuals who had allegedly been converted to Islam, and the case had to go to court because the convert had allegedly kidnapped the couple’s children.

Other cases that I consider as unnecessary for our courts to be occupied with their precious time involve children of local parents who married foreigners or those born out of wedlock. Without proper identity documents, these innocent children face a lot of hardships and are often discriminated against.

To obtain their identity cards, some of these cases have gone to court, yet the Immigration Department refuses to budge. This, despite the promises made by Najib before the last general election that such issues will be addressed urgently.

There are also cases involving the Bersih movement and the opposition that I see which do not hold water, and should not waste the court’s time. For example, I am not sure what happened to PKR lawmaker Tian Chua’s case over just some comments about the death of our policemen during the Sulu invasion of Lahad Datu.

In my opinion and let us be frank to talk about it, the fault is more likely to be the then-defence minister’s early decision, when he did not take the invasion seriously. These men were armed and they were hiding in the woods.

To say the least, our policemen were ill-equipped to handle snipers who shot from unknown directions. In such situations, one would have sent in armoured vehicles and troops instead of allowing our boys in blue to be shot at.

Although these men were commandos, as far as I can recall, their training was not to take on their targets in the open field; therefore, I see no reason why Chua’s comments about ‘mati katak’ (or something of that nature) could even be seditious.

If anything was seditious, it was the shouts of people in Penang during the Gangnam Style performance, when they thundered ‘No!’ to Najib despite the opportunity to watch Psy perform. Looking back, I wonder if the sponsor had been one young man with the initial JL, whom Sarawak Report highlighted recently, was said to have invited the South Korean artiste to his birthday bash.

Now, of course, PKR’s vice-president Nurul Izzah Anwar is being ostracised for meeting with the daughter of the self-proclaimed sultan of Sulu, not to mention that the woman she had met was just an ordinary woman. What is so wrong for Nurul Izzah to even befriend her, since she does not lay claim on Sabah the way her father had done before his demise?

Bersih 2.0’s steering committee chairperson Maria Chin is now facing sedition charges. Others like political activists Adam Ali and Hishamuddin Rais, university professors Azmi Shahrom and Dr Abdul Aziz Bari, and cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Haque or more fondly known as Zunar, are all facing some form of prosecution.

I can go on and on, but there are simply too many of these cases that are hardly worth the court’s time, or at least from a layman’s point of view, should be thrown out of court.

My question therefore is, having been a former Federal Court judge himself, will Apandi now as the new attorney-general start to clean up the act? Will he continue to drop more cases that are simply perceived as being political persecution than seriously worth the judges’ time?

---

STEPHEN NG is an ordinary citizen with an avid interest in following political developments in the country since 2008. -Mkini