All those who believe that a caged parrot is a perfect example of a spineless government agency that only imitates the voice of its master, have never known . Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) spineless government agency is a breed unto itself
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. civil society indicating a typical travesty of justice,
Israell – BN – style.endless possibilities
The exception as the rule Good Intentions cannot justify bad delivery
Bill passd in parliamnt are not in the laudable intention but in the clogged delivery. The desire to be politically correct has overtaken the imperative to be politically sensible. Method and order structural flaw could further erode the already ebbing credibility of our parliamentary systemThe irony is that such flaws can be easily corrected, with some time and thought. Both have been absent from the process, the favourite weapons of Hercule Poirot, might be usefully employed in analysis.It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape ofJustice
When Instuation smuggled The Predators to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over years; this central truth has not.the umbilical chord of the colonial, or neo-colonial. Who had dared to arrest a pillar of the American corporate establishment. ‘Bail or no bail’: what was a rotten piece of paper signed in an Indian court worth to a lord of Wall Street? Not even the decency of silence. Anderson was publicly, even proudly, contemptuous of those who did not have the courage to interrupt his freedom for a mere industrial disaster in which a few thousand semi-slave Indians had been gassed to death within hours and thousands more would die over years.Accusation is the easy exit route from Bhopal. Introspection will take us back to the beginning. Betrayal is impossible without trust. We did not trust Carbide to be honest. We trusted our political class, and it continues to search for new and inventive ways to betray us again.
What bothers me is the carpet bombing scam coverage that ensured there were no goodbyes for the man who with evangelical zeal exposed the sleazy underbelly of the high-profile murder of Mongolian Altantuya Shaariibuu, over the past 9 years, and did his best to set it right. Worse, there was no debate over who his successor ought to be. So the Government sneaked in its own nominee,Datuk Seri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah as public prosecutor clearly to undo some of the outstanding work Ghani Patail did for Mahathir
Take a leaf from Appointment of Shafee in Sodomy II
He pointed out that the move was permissible by law, citing the recent appointment of lawyer Datuk Seri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah as public prosecutor in the appeal against Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s Sodomy II acquittal.
Datuk Seri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah as public prosecutor in the appeal against Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s Sodomy II acquittal.
Muhammad Shafee was given the authority by the Attorney-General to lead the prosecution team in its appeal against Anwar’s acquittal on a charge of sodomising his former aide Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan.
Anwar’s defence team, however, filed a motion in the Court of Appeal in Putrajaya yesterday to disqualify the appointment.Earlier today, PKR’s R. Sivarasa criticised the Court of Appeal over the two former policemen’s acquittal, saying it should have ordered a retrial instead.
The Subang MP stressed that the appellate court was empowered to do so, especially when there were a number of key witnesses who were not called during the High Court trial that led to the duo’s conviction in 2009.
“There is ample power under the law in section 60 of the Courts Judicature Act 1964 to order a retrial which is regularly done in appeals,” Sivarasa said.
Always watch out for ‘The Big Obsessive Scam’ the media goes after. It often covers up a great deal more than it reveals. It also draws away our immediate attention from issues where we were about to get close to a dangerous truth or two. Poirot famously described it as a red herring, a cunning device to draw people’s attention away from real issues to focus on a non sequitur MacGuffin.
Like the MacGuffin, which Hitchcock made cult, The Big Obsessive Scam vanishes or becomes irrelevant once its purpose is over. This is what the spot fixing scam could be: Too much outrage chasing what matters so little to most of us. The evidence in hand is flimsy, so flimsy that it’s unlikely to get past the smallest court but the noise around it is so much one would think World War III has broken out
The prosecution was aware that the trial judge had failed to thoroughly analyse the evidence and had urged the Court of Appeal to use its powers to prevent a miscarriage of justice but the three-man bench was not convinced.
In fact, Judge Datuk Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat, who wrote the grounds, said, the two ex-policemen should have been acquitted at the trial stage.
She said the prosecution had conceded that there were various non-directions by the trial judge, Mohd Zaki Md Yassin, and invited them to use a provision in the Court of Judicature Act 1964 to cure the defects.
The failure by the prosection to call Deputy Superintendent Musa Safri and the failure of the trial judge to consider the notice of alibi were among the main reasons for the acquittal of two former policemen in the murder of Mongolian Altantuya Shaariibuu (pic).
In the 47-page written judgment released this morning, the three-man Court of Appeal bench ruled the failure to call Musa proved fatal to the prosecution’s case as he could have unravelled the narrative of the prosection’s case.
The two former police commandos Chief Inspector Azilah Hadri and Corporal Sirul Azhar Umar were acquitted on Friday for the murder of Altantuya on October 19, 2006.
he judgment written by Court of Appeal judge Datuk Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat also pointed to discrepancies in the affidavit by political analyst Abdul Razak Baginda and Sirul’s testimony in court pertaining to Musa’s involvement in the case.
“It must not be overlooked that this ugly and horrendous episode started with the request by Razak to Musa before Azilah and Sirul came into the picture.
“The evidence established that Azilah and Sirul’s task was to patrol the vicinity of Razak’s house and their presence there that night was upon the request of Razak to Azilah,” Tengku Maimun said in the judgment.
Only Musa could have unravelled this, she added.
At the time, Musa was the aide-de-camp of the then-Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
On Azilah’s acquittal, the Court of Appeal ruled that the trial judge Datuk Mohd Zaki Md Yassin, had failed to consider the notice of alibi which revealed that Azilah could not have been at two places at the same time on the night of Altantuya’s murder.
The Court of Appeal said that the call logs of telecommunication companies which were tendered by the prosecution were aimed to track Azilah’s movement on the day Altantuya was murdered.
According to the exhibits, Azilah was at Pekan Subang at 10.15pm and at Kampung Melayu Subang at 10.19pm.
However, the police station diary at Bukit Aman indicated that Azilah was there collecting his weapon, a Glock EAH 387 and two bullet magazines, at 10.18pm.
He had then left for Putrajaya for escort duty to then-Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
The investigating officer in Altantuya’s murder case, ASP Tonny Lunggan had testified in the trial that the station diary was true and accurate.
This, the Court of Appeal held, had cast doubts on the accuracy of the call logs.
He said an appellate court in exceptional cases would have upheld a conviction despite the misdirection.
“However, looking at the whole evidence and circumstances of this case, we are of the view that this is not a fit and proper case for us to invoke the proviso,” she said.
Tengku Maimun said the circumstances relied upon by the prosecution had not been fully and cogently established and the chain of evidence was not complete.
“We cannot say if a reasonable tribunal properly directed, would have convicted the appellants (Azilah Hadri and Sirul Azhar Umar) on available evidence.
“The court below had ignored and overlooked salient facts and evidence favourable to the appellants which resulted in serious and substantial miscarriage of justice to the appellants,” she said.
She said the cumulative effect of these non-directions rendered the convictions of the appellants unsafe.
Tengku Maimun also said that the prosecution’s case relied on circumstantial evidence.
All those who believe that a caged parrot is a perfect example of a spineless government agency that only imitates the voice of its master, have never known a caged parrot.
“It is our judgment that the circumstantial evidence are insufficient and not strong enough to sustain the finding of guilt,” she said.
Tunku Maimun said the appellate court was conscious that a heinous crime had been committed but the benefit of the doubt must be given to the policemen.
The Court of Appeal also ruled that Deputy Superintendent Musa Safri, the former aide-de-camp of then-Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, could have unravelled events which could have contradicted political analyst Abdul Razak Baginda’s statement in his affidavit which formed part of the prosecution’s evidence.
And the failure to call him to the murder trial proved fatal to the prosecution’s case as there was no rebuttal against Abdul Razak’s statement.
On that note, the trial judge had acquitted and discharged him without calling for his defence.
However, there were discrepancies in the affidavit with former police Corporal Sirul Azhar Umar’s statement with regards to the senior officer, which only Musa could have unravelled.
This was stated in the 47-page unanimous judgment written by Tengku Maimun.
The burden of independence OF Justice
The unfortunate truth is that there is reason for this cynicism. A lot of the opinions that abound in media, both mainstream and social, are rooted in pre-fabricated positions that fly under the flag of one label or another. In addition, over the last few years it has become clear that very few of our certitudes about the independence ofjustice the allegedly independent institutions stand up to scrutiny.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order.
It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape of JUSTICE
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Instuation smuggled The Predators to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has not.
ustice M S Liberhan did not need 17 years and a thousand pages to tell us what has been public knowledge since December 6, 1992. The Babri mosque was not torn down in the dark of night. It was brought down slowly, stone by stone, in Sunday sunlight, before hundreds of journalists, to the cheers of countless thousands of kar sewaks in and around Ayodhya. The mosque was not dynamited in a minute; it was demolished by crowbar and shovel.The Liberhan Commission could have completed half its report by taking a look at that film. The media was equally comprehensive in its coverage of the brutal riots that followed: The Sri Krishna report has done far greater justice to the truth in its findings on the Maharashtra riots, so much so that there is all-party collusion on its non-implementation. There was only one question trapped in doubt: What was prime minister P V Narasimha Rao doing while Babri was destroyed on the longest day of the last two decades? Why was home minister S B Chavan, father of the present Maharashtra chief minister, immobile, inscrutable and stolid?
Shock raced through Delhi when word filtered through that an assault had begun in Ayodhya. Phone calls began to pour into the prime minister’s residence in the hope that he would use the authority of the state to uphold the rule of law and fulfil a political and moral obligation. There was a monstrous response from the prime minister’s personal secretary. The PM was either unavailable or, worse, asleep. It was a lie. Rao’s inaction and Chavan’s collaboration were deliberate.
Liberhan protects prime minister then with an equally conscious fudge, shuffling the blame on to unspecified intelligence agencies. Everyone knew what was going on, IB officers better than most. PM called a Cabinet meeting only in the evening, when there was nothing left to be saved — not even reputation. By this time, fires of hatred were lighting up the dusk of Mumbai and dozens of cities across the nation. An elaborate programme of blame, reward and punishment was put into place. Those (including bureaucrats and journalists) who acquiesced in Rao’s charade were rewarded; Congress Muslims got a bonus for silence. Rao remained in power till 1996, but he neither ruled nor lived in peace.
The words of this column will make no difference. A government can reduce the past to rubble as easily as an Opposition party can erase a centuries-old mosque. My apologies for a rare detour into the personal, but this is a rare moment. I was a minor part of the Rao government and resigned on the night of December 6 since the stone wall constructed around the prime minister’s house had become impervious to anything except sycophancy. Words demand a different kind of loyalty, and one was relieved to return to the world of words.
