An appointment to sit up and notice

 

From Terence Netto

Former Court of Appeal judge Hishamudin Yunus’s appointment to the long vacant post of Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) chairman should aid its restoration to a stature befitting the hopes the public had for it at its inception in 2000.

If not his liberal calibre when he sat on the bench, then at least his doggedness should see his three-year tenure, begun on July 3, raise the stature of a body whose appellation alone ought to command the doffing of hats.

Hishamudin’s persistence in the face of obstacles while heading an independent committee to draw up a report on foreign workers, commissioned in late 2018, saw their report submitted to the Pakatan Harapan government after eight months of study of a complex problem.

The committee had been the joint initiative of the home ministry, then under Muhyiddin Yassin, and of its human resources counterpart, headed by its minister, M Kula Segaran.

The reformist push that had brought the PH government to power in May 2018 engendered the move for an independent study of the foreign worker problem, beset as it was, and which continues to be, an opaque system of procurement and approvals.

It took doggedness on Hishamudin’s part to unwind the tangles in which the process was enmeshed, issuing in recommendations for a rationalisation of the process that made transparency easy and, consequently, graft difficult.

It was a triumph of reformist drive over leaden bureaucracy.

But, as with many things in the effort to free the country from the shackles of corruption, the report’s call for the creation of a strategic framework to deal with the foreign worker problem holistically rather than in piecemeal fashion was more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

As a judge, Hishamudin had carved out a reputation as a liberal in matters of human rights and as foe of arbitrary fiat.

A judge of his calibre was logically on course for elevation to the highest court of the land but some decisions against the government saw him end his career without the lustre of a seat on the Federal Court, a churlish reminder that politics matters more than principle.

He retired from the bench in 2015, six years after his elevation to the Court of Appeal.

In recent years his reputation as a judge has garnered him invitations to speak on the evolution of our constitutional principles where he has held that the basic liberal democratic structure of our constitution renders it impervious to radical alteration.

This is reassuring in the face of forces pushing for its theocratic transformation.

Hishamudin’s liberal instincts and his doggedness in the face of bureaucratic inertia and deviousness ought to restore Suhakam to a loftier stature than it has enjoyed in recent years. -FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.