The government has to set up a Royal Commission with the necessary powers to thoroughly investigate the entire judiciary, as there is a desperate need to clean house and to do so comprehensively.
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Our judiciary has not been in the pink of health, especially since the sacking of Tun Salleh Abbas as Lord President in 1988.
Since then the impartiality, the independence and the basic honesty of the judiciary have been questioned time and time again.
Two major concerns are the method by which judges are appointed and related to this, the vital question as to whether the judiciary is truly free from executive interference. These are fears that strike to the heart of a democratic system.
Without the checks and balances that having three separate branches of government – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary – provides, one cannot say that there is a true democracy.
And one cannot say with any certainty that the law will protect the citizens from any sort of despotic behaviour.
This sad lack of faith in the judicial system (which is the penultimate defender of democracy and the citizenry) has been with us for nearly 20 years.
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Let’s just take a look at how low the legal system has sunk. The judge who was supposed to be at the other end of the videotaped phone conversation, in true Bart Simpson style, told the de facto Minister of Law that it wasn’t him. The Minister then told this to the press.
My question is: “So what”? Does that mean the next time someone is accused of murder or corruption, all he needs to say is “I didn’t do it”?
Who cares what the judge said. If the video is not a fake (and it looks mighty authentic to me, no Tian Chua Photoshop trickery here), the suspects must be cross-examined.
And to top it off, the Minister tried to deflect the situation by saying that an opposition political party released the videotape and therefore there had to be a political agenda.
I’m sorry YB, but I don’t care who came up and delivered the video. If it is true, it shows that we need major changes in our judiciary and no political blame shifting is going to alter that.
Source: The Star
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