Court did not say lawyers cited wrong law in Maria Chin case

 

In your report on the Maria Chin Abdullah Federal Court judgment, “Lawyer relied on wrong case law to challenge Maria’s travel ban, says Federal Court”, you highlighted and mentioned twice that the Federal Court said the lawyers for Maria Chin relied on the wrongcase law to challenge her travel ban.

This refers to the citation of the trilogy of Federal Court decisions: Semenyih Jaya, Indira Gandhi and Alma Nudo.

First, there was no mention of the lawyers citing the wrong law. Paragraph 163 of the majority judgment by Justice Abdul Rahman Sebli says that “With all due respect, Semenyih Jaya, Indira Gandhi and Alma Nudo had been misconstrued and misapplied by the appellant”.

Secondly, this view (reliance on the wrong case law) was not shared by the entire Federal Court, as the headline and first paragraph of your article suggest. Three of the seven judges led by the chief justice discussed and relied heavily on these three cases: stating that the Federal Court in the first two judgments held that judicial review could not be excluded by any Act of Parliament, and that these judgments had been approved and followed by a nine-member Federal Court bench in Alma Nudo.

The chief justice’s judgment also referred to a litany of cases where these cases had been applied. Yet another case being JRI Resources v Kuwait Finance House [2019] where “the majority emphasised that it had no reservations in accepting the proposition of law expounded in the Semenyih Jaya case”.

This indeed was the precise question that Maria Chin was given leave by a three-member panel to appeal to the Federal Court on: Whether judicial review can be ousted in the light of these cases.

It is clear therefore that three of the judges led by the chief justice did not agree that reference to these three landmark cases represented the wrong law as held by the majority of one. And that reliance on these three cases by the appellant was not wrong and was entirely appropriate.

Gurdial Singh Nijar, Joshua Andran, Lim Wei Jiet and Abraham Au Tian Hui are lawyers for Maria Chin Abdullah - FMT

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