Friday, July 31, 2009

Come Join us NOW for the New Malaysia. Let's Hear Our Last Message !!!!!




Let's change for the New Malaysia,
Let's change for the sake of Our Children,
Starting with the Man in the Mirror !!!!!

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Do We Need Unjust and Draconian Laws?

Benjamin Franklin is said to have stated that "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Most Malaysians would prefer to contest that sentiment.

After all, for decades we have tolerated draconian and unjust laws foisted upon us by the government. We have always accepted them as necessary for our safety and wellbeing.

Perhaps this was true for a time. At the time of independence, up till the later 1970s, we were faced with the threat of a communist insurgency (described as an Emergency, but according to some historians, a civil war given an euphemistic name to avoid causing jitters in the commercial establishment).

When top-ranking national police officers and British High Commissioners are being picked off by terrorists, you've got to admit that it might be handy to have a law permitting the police to detain someone without charging them with any crime.

Indeed, that's exactly what countries like the United States and United Kingdom are doing right now in order to combat terrorism. While I have my doubts about the efficacy of these measures, they do provide for the police to temporarily detain people without charging them with anything (although they do force the police to get a court order for slightly extended periods of time).

But here's the rub folks: they only do it temporarily. If the police can't find anything to charge you with, they have to let you go after a set period of time. There is no leeway for infinite renewals of your detention order. And even while you are in jail, you will generally have access to legal counsel.

What happens in Malaysia? Apparently a comment posted on a blog constitutes an official secret posing a grave threat to national security — a threat so grave that the blog owner has to be held for 14 days (though the judge wisely reduced it to 4) for questioning, and denied access to legal counsel for most of the time — even in court proceedings.

But what happens if the government doesn't like you for some reason? No problem — all it has to do is detain you under the Internal Security Act. The Home Minister can renew your detention order ad infinitum so that you spend decades in jail. You don't need access to lawyers because you probably won't appear before a judge, detentions under the Act being free of judicial review.

Tell me, do we really need all this bullshit to keep us safe from terrorism? Do we need an Official Secrets Act worded so terribly that anything a Minister wants kept secret becomes a secret, regardless of its value to the public or its lack of importance to national security?

Do we need an Internal Security Act that allows the government to lock up anyone it doesn't like and throw away the key, without even a peep from the courts?

What is wrong with an OSA that is tightly phrased to ensure only secrets related to national security are kept secret? What is wrong with an ISA that only permits temporary detentions and allows the courts to examine the legality and justice of a detention?

Malaysians truly deserve neither liberty nor safety, and that is exactly what is happening. We are so constrained by censorship that we dare not even say what we think, and yet we can't even sleep soundly at night.

We have to abolish or amend the ISA. We have to promote accountability and transparency in the government — why let the government proclaim toll tariffs an official secret?

Is this truly necessary for our safety? Must we tolerate such blatant infractions and infringements of what our Constitution itself states to be "fundamental liberties"? Do we really need these draconian laws to keep us safe?



Draconian Laws: the Truth and Our Economy

Draconian legislation has come under the spotlight again in Malaysia as of late, now that the government has been actively using repressive statutes to round up journalists and politicians. It is wrong, no doubt, to arrest people without the benefit of due process, and to jail them without a fair trial. But what is really wrong, and what can almost never be justified, is the suppression of the human spirit: of the right to think for yourself, and to seek the truth.

We all search for truth in our lives, be it in the realm of the rational or the spiritual. We implicitly assume that the truth is desirable, that if the government will not help us in finding the truth, it will at least not hinder us. But laws which crush the human spirit, laws which let the government detain anyone for any reason it likes — or no reason at all — these are laws which suppress the truth, and which break our spirit.

We often bemoan the faltering and falling position of our universities compared to their international counterparts. We wonder what can be done to rectify this terrible state of things; we pour money and people into our education system, and hope for better results. But if you do not let people seek the truth, what is the point of having an academic system? If we feed our students lies, how can we hope to succeed when the international benchmark is one of truth?

I often come in contact with people who are shocked at how outspoken my writing can be. I always tell them that it is nothing compared to some of the rubbish morons on the internet regularly spew. But I respect those morons' right to be foolish and ignorant; if they want to believe Islam or Christianity or secularism have nothing of value, if they want to believe all Malays are lazy or all Chinese are greedy, I can't do anything about that, beyond giving my point of view. I believe we all have the right to an opinion of our own, and the right to continue developing our opinions as we find out more about our world, and get closer to the truth.

The search for truth goes to the very fundamental nature of the human spirit. Whether you are a rational academic or emotional dreamer, no matter how you perceive the world, you are looking for truth. But like any dictatorial government, ours seeks to suppress the search for truth by imposing its own truth on us.

A friend conducted some research into the economy and education system over the summer; I suggested he look into publishing his work in a local academic journal. His response: "Thanks but no thanks John — I'm not like you, I'm not interested in running afoul of the ISA." When academics refuse to publish their work because they fear the consequences, it is hard to see how our laws and our government promote or even tolerate the search for truth.

And the same goes for spiritual truths. The government insists only its reading of Islam can be tolerated; Shia Muslims, and really, any sort of Muslim who deviates from the brand promoted by the government, can expect nothing but harsh treatment from the authorities. Now, I am not a Muslim, and I don't think I have a right to tell Muslims how to practice their religion, but how can any of us pursue the truth when we are intentionally suppressing others in their own journey?

This climate of fear we live in is not something we can tolerate just because we can still put food on the table and send the kids to school. It cuts to something fundamental about us as human beings. We have a right to know, and a right to believe.

When you reject the notion that people have the right to seek the truth, you are not just rejecting some artsy-fartsy Western liberal ideas. You are rejecting the enrichment of human life, the spirit which has governed the growth of both religion and science over the millenia. You are rejecting economic development, because you have rejected the exposure of lies and corruption, because you have rejected the growth of human knowledge.

Ultimately human rights issues do boil down to economic realities. Like it or not, greater freedom of thought and expression will be a boon for our economy and the general state of our country. It is impossible to expose corruption if nobody wants to hear it because the truth is too harsh. It is impossible to carry out research if you fear you will end up in jail for your conclusions about the truth. Laws which fight the truth, be they the ISA, OSA, Sedition Act, PPPA, whatever you call them — these laws ultimately hold us back from growing as a society and as an economy.

These issues are not about the right to strip naked in public or to commit immoral acts; they are about the right to say what you think and express how you see the truth. If we cannot do that, we cannot grow. Truth compels us to abolish these laws which stand in the way of our growth, as individual human beings, and as a nation.
http://ejsnfauzan.blog.friendster.com/files/isa.jpg

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Why the ISA Must Go??!!!

I am not particularly enthralled, excited or thrilled by the human rights issues often raised by Malaysian liberals. If you ask me, these issues are not nearly as relevant as some truly pressing and fundamental issues, such as education.

But that does not mean we should totally ignore the problem of human rights in Malaysia. Our rights may not be directly infringed — this website is evidence of that — but they are indirectly curtailed by the chilling and self-censoring effect of laws like the Internal Security Act — the dearth of other websites like this is evidence of that.

(I have no evidence at all to support this, so this is purely a conjectural hypothesis, but I suspect that most intelligent and moderate Malaysians are afraid to voice their views, thus ceding the debate to the fearless extremists from both sides.)

I have already dealt with the subject of freedom of speech and how it destroys the higher education of our country. But the ISA too is an issue worth discussing, even though I do not rank it high on my priority list. (If you ask me, if we can only fix our education, the next generation can fix almost everything else.)

What is the ISA, you may ask? The ISA is a law allowing the government to detain for a practically indefinite period anyone who it suspects may pose a threat to national security.

The actual wording of the law sounds more liberal, but as it has been interpreted and applied, the ISA is basically a free pass for the government to arrest anyone it likes, without any judicial review whatsoever.

This mentality has pervaded our society to the extent that a leader of the Gerakan Mansuhkan ISA (GMI, or Movement to Abolish the ISA) actually called for the ISA to be used to detain Muslim heretics.

This represents the most obvious danger of the ISA, in my view — the slippery slope it poses. First, you're just rounding up communist terrorists, next, you're arresting infidels and political dissidents.

This is why the ancestor of the ISA, a law written along similar lines, had to be renewed every year by Parliament — to check abuse. The government removed this check by passing a permanent ISA in the early 1960s.

So, at the very least, we should be curtailing the ability of the executive to simply arrest whoever it likes for whatever reason. We must confine the ISA to its original purpose — national security.

But is the ISA even necessary in the first place? Does it not run counter to the idea that one must be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?

The British themselves have something along the lines of the ISA, but the most the executive is allowed to summarily detain anyone before charging them with a crime in court is a few weeks. Proposals to extend this period to a few months have been struck down by Parliament.

So, we ought to further curtail the ISA's reach and not allow the Home Minister to detain anyone he likes for as long as he likes. That makes sense.

But this does not answer the question of whether preventive detention can ever be justified — that you should be allowed to arrest someone before that someone commits a crime.

To me, the answer is simple — yes, but provided you can present evidence in a court of law that shows there was an attempt to commit a crime. Attempted murder is as much a crime as real murder.

At the moment, the ISA has no need for evidence because the Home Minister's decisions are not subject to judicial review. This is wrong, and has to end.

We either have enough evidence to convict someone of a crime, or we do not. The purpose of the British law is to allow the police to gather evidence while the suspect sits in jail, which makes a lot more sense than the approach some law enforcers in America have taken, whereby the suspect is arrested on petty crimes while evidence is rounded up. (Amerian gangster Al Capone was arrested for activities unrelated to his involvement in the gang scene.)

For this reason, I think the ISA must be abolished. It cannot sit well with any Malaysian who respects the law and the principles it is founded upon that you can be thrown in jail for an indefinite period without any hope of release, when there is not a shred of evidence against you.


internal security act,ISA,Malaysia,Politics

Monday, July 27, 2009

Time to get rid of draconian ISA - Assoc Prof Azmi Sharom

Brave New World (The Star)
September 18, 2008

"The preamble of the Internal Security Act is crystal clear in that it (ISA) was intended to be used for violent threats to the country."

_______________________________________


On June 21, 1960, in the Dewan Rakyat, then Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak said: “The Government has no desire whatsoever to hinder healthy democratic opposition in any way. This is a democratic country and the Government intends to maintain it as such. It is the enemies of democracy who will be detained.”

He said this during the debate on the Internal Security Bill and it is reported in the Hansard.

The Bill of course went on to become our infamous Internal Security Act (ISA).

It is a tough law but it must be remembered that as broad as the powers given to the Government are; the preamble of the Act has this to say:

“[This is] An Act to provide for the internal security of the Federation, preventive detention, the prevention of subversion, the suppression of organised violence against persons and property in specified areas of the Federation and for matters incidental thereto”.

The late Hugh Hickling, the drafter of the ISA, had said in interviews shortly before his death, that the preamble is crystal clear and that the ISA was intended to be used for violent threats to the country.

The late former Deputy Prime Minister Tun Dr Ismail Hussein, when confronted with the draconian nature of the Act, admitted that it was so.

However, he also pointed out that the normal workings of a democracy, such as a free press, would keep the Government in check and be a disincentive for them to abuse their powers.

What we have here is a forgotten little piece of history.

The ISA was drafted to battle the violent communist insurgency, and, one presumes, other threats of the same ilk.

As stated by the father of the current Deputy Prime Minister, it was not meant to stifle democracy. And furthermore, it is the very mechanisms of democracy, such as a free press, that will keep the use of the ISA in check.

In this light, we can see that the powers provided by the ISA have been severely abused over the decades.

The latest example of course is the arrest of Raja Petra Kamarudin, Teresa Kok and Tan Hoon Cheng.

The reasons for the detention of the three have nothing to do at all with any sort of violent action or even proposed violent action on their part.

In the case of Tan, the justification for her 16-hour detention was so ludicrous and so obtuse, that it beggared belief.

The ISA was not meant to be used as a personal protection device. And pray tell how a 16-hour detention after which the individual was released back into the public sphere can be considered “protection”?

Raja Petra is currently being charged for criminal defamation and sedition.

He is facing the law in open court where he shall be accused and he shall have the opportunity to defend himself or he would have done if he was not locked up right now.

Why on earth is he being detained? Is he planning some sort of armed rebellion? There is no evidence at all to indicate even the slightest hint of that.

And Kok is being detained because some political opponents have decided to accuse her of offending Islam.

If these accusations are false, and there are indications that they are, then there is a term for this kind of behaviour – fitnah.

Fitnah is the most despicable crime committed only by the most despicable of creatures.

I am disgusted by the latest use of the ISA. It is undoubtedly going against the spirit and the intention of the ISA.

The arrest of Raja Petra, Kok and Tan also shows that the law is so open to abuse that we have no other choice but to get rid of it. There can be no room for amendments.

The ISA must go.

http://dilafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/00003340.jpg

http://azmisharom.blogspot.com/

Friday, July 24, 2009

Memo to the king to abolish the ISA & Please sign Petition,Justice For Teo Beng Hock.





We, the undersigned, hereby demand :-
(1) The establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry to independently and thoroughly investigate this tragic incident.
(2) The immediate resignation of the Malaysia Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) National Director.
(3) The unconditional apology by Minister in the Prime Minister Department Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz over his remarks on Beng Hock’s death.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned




Please click the above picture to sign the petition for beng hock.Thanks.