Najib deserves a fair trial

You are going to hate me for saying this: Najib Razak should be given the fairest trial possible for all his cases.

April 3, 2019 was the start of the trial of the century. It is closely watched by the world - it is the first time in history that a former prime minister of Malaysia is charged in court.

For all the media fanfare and the public sensationalism, this is the most important trial to get right. Getting right doesn’t imply that the trial outcome must find Najib guilty; instead, getting right means ensuring Najib’s right to a fair trial is upheld.

This means the judges involved must be ready to consider and evaluate the requests of Najib and his legal team to a fair trial, provided they are reasonable.

Why fair trial

The reasons why we should give Najib the fairest trial possible are a few. One, when the eventuality of a guilty verdict comes, Najib will have exhausted his excuses and must concede to the inviolability of the legal process and the law.

Two, a fair trial would ensure that those who are still in denial of Najib’s alleged wrongdoings get a proper opportunity to be convinced of his guilt.

But the most important reason for a fair trial is to make sure our society believes in justice again. A fair trial will make sure the legal system works, and a system that is fair to even the worst criminal shall be fair to all.

No matter what your opinions are on Anwar Ibrahim (above), his sodomy trials were watershed events for the legal system in Malaysia.

The severe abuse of process in the 1999 and 2015 trials that ranged from flawed evidence, questionable witnesses, procedural shortcomings, denial of the accused’s fundamental rights, and high-level political collusion were dark cruxes in our legal history.

The shameful constitutional crisis of 1988 that subverted the judges’ powers to the executive had found two of its prime examples in Anwar’s sodomy trials.

No justice for old Malaysia

Since those inflection points, the people’s impression of the judiciary was that judges could be easily bought. The quality of the legal judgements has drastically declined, and the legal universe has since stopped referring to Malaysian judgments as useful precedence or comparisons.

Not only that, the most important implication from these events was that the people started to think that justice was not worth pursuing, because the strong and the powerful would subvert the entire process to their favour.

For Anwar’s trials, the manipulation and control of the legal system was meant to consolidate the establishment’s political power by destroying Anwar’s.

When the people start seeing that justice is not worth pursuing or not pursuable, they slowly start to disbelieve in justice - then justice dies.

When the new Chief Justice Richard Malanjum (above) assumed the highest judicial position in the country, the first task he put upon himself was to restore confidence in the judiciary.

He acknowledged that the public had little trust in judges, and he implied that past landmark cases had a role to play in creating this high level of distrust.

How can confidence be restored?

Confidence can be restored either through a series of small but consistent judgments where there is an absence of high-profile miscarriages of justice for a long period of time.

Or it could be through landmark cases like Najib’s money laundering cases that could turn the tables once and for all.

Even for the worst

You may ask: Why give a fair trial to the person who least believed in a fair trial? Najib was the person who was chiefly responsible for the 2015 flawed conviction of Anwar.

It is precisely because Najib never believed in a fair trial for others that we should give him the fairest trial possible.

That is the only way to show that the system works.

Because if we can ensure that even the worst of the worst in society gets a fair trial, then we can trust the system to be fair to everyone. A society that believes in justice will gather its conscience once more.

That’s why I call for the fairest trial possible for the highest-profile case in recent memory.

Even though we may have made up our minds on Najib’s guilt, we must still uphold all fundamental precepts of a fair trial, including the presumption of innocence, the right to an impartial and independent judge, the right to legal representation, the right to examine witnesses, etc.

Without a doubt, Najib and his legal team will insist they are not being given a fair trial. I say, we give them the fairest trial that leaves no shadow of a doubt.

So that when it is all finally over, we could regain our trust in the propriety of the process and the sanctity of the law.

Most of all, we could regain our conscience as a society – one that believes in the idea of justice.

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JAMES CHAI works at a law firm. E-mail him at jameschai.mpuk@gmail.com. - Mkini