When does party loyalty become complicity?

 Individual transgressions often reflect collective institutional behaviour when corrupt practices are normalised within the party's operational infrastructure.

From Hanipa Maidin

Perikatan Nasional deputy chairman and Wawasan president Hamzah Zainudin posited that attributing systemic corruption to an entire political organisation based on the malfeasance of a singular member constitutes an unjust generalisation.

He further argued that individual allegations of corruption should not serve as grounds to impede strategic coalitions between political entities, applying this rationale specifically to the ongoing political understanding between Barisan Nasional (BN) and Perikatan Nasional (PN).

From a traditional legal paradigm, criminal culpability is fundamentally predicated on individual agency. Consequently, an actor must independently bear the legal repercussions of their illicit conduct.

However, criminal jurisprudence explicitly pairs the principle of primary liability with the doctrine of secondary liability, commonly conceptualised as “aiding and abetting”.

Legally, abetment encompasses the provision of psychological encouragement, instigation, or implicit institutional approval. Under this doctrine, secondary actors can be prosecuted and penalised to the same degree as the principal perpetrator, even in the absence of direct physical execution.

Pursuant to Section 107 of the Penal Code, abetment is defined as the act of instigating, conspiring, or intentionally aiding in the commission of an offence.

An individual is classified as an abettor if they incite the crime, engage in a criminal conspiracy to execute it, or provide deliberate assistance towards its completion. Hence, liability for abetment may still attach irrespective of whether the principal offence is ultimately consummated.

Furthermore, under Section 109 of the Penal Code, if the offence occurs as a consequence of such instigation or assistance, the abettor is subject to the same penalty prescribed for the principal offender.

Be that as it may, while assigning collective blame for individual misconduct may initially appear problematic, this defence erodes when a politician or political party directly or indirectly facilitates the criminal enterprise.

Direct institutional involvement manifests clearly when the organiser extracts material or financial utility from the offence.

In the landmark 1MDB case, for instance, empirical evidence demonstrated that illicitly acquired funds from the sovereign wealth fund were systematically distributed to party leadership across multiple administrative echelons.

Under such conditions of systemic financial enrichment, complete institutional absolution becomes untenable.

Furthermore, when a political institution possesses full cognisance of internal corruption yet fails to implement corrective measures – choosing instead to vigorously defend the implicated actor – it cannot be exonerated from public and moral condemnation.

This systemic complicity is severely compounded when, following a formal judicial conviction for corruption or abuse of power, party leadership and the general membership even initiate collective campaigns to exonerate the convicted official.

In such scenarios, one may argue that the organisation effectively transcends passive bystander status, and through active institutional validation, the party directly condones the criminal act.

The proposition that a political entity should remain insulated from liability for offences perpetrated by its individual leadership is contingent upon structural and institutional contexts.

In instances where systemic corruption is deeply embedded within the institutional matrix of a political party, establishing a distinct line of demarcation between individual criminality and organisational misconduct becomes highly problematic.

Consequently, when corrupt practices are normalised within the party’s operational infrastructure, individual transgressions often reflect collective institutional behaviour rather than isolated deviance. - FMT

Hanipa Maidin is a former deputy minister of law and an FMT reader.

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