Legal officer should give govt good advice
JOHAN Jaaffar’s “The dawn of a new era” (May 14, The Star) touches on the euphoria of Malaysia’s comeback to sanity mood after witnessing live, over all local and foreign networks, the fall from grace of former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak and the dramatic appointment of nonagenarian Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad as our new Prime Minister.
The episode was almost like a Shakespearean drama with intrigues akin to those in tragedies such as Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. The plot of the then powers that be not to recognise that Dr Mahathir had more than sufficient numbers to warrant his appointment as Prime Minister was callous, to put it mildly.
Constitutional convention requires that the King officially anoints Dr Mahathir as prime minister as soon as possible, because in law there cannot be a vacuum in the governance of a country once a caretaker government is defeated. It matters not whether the caretaker government is defeated in the middle of the night or the wee hours of the morning.
But for some unknown reason, the audience sought was not immediately accorded to Dr Mahathir. However, palace officials assured him the King would grant him audience the next day at 10am, which was postponed to 5pm and ultimately to 9.30pm.
Every law student worth his salt knows that the Attorney General no longer remains an adviser to the King or the incoming prime minister once the caretaker government ceases to exist.
And given his public statements in the 1MDB scandal, it would be simply perplexing for either Dr Mahathir or the King to still retain the AG’s services.
One of the legal precepts I still remember from my constitutional law days at law school almost half a century ago is the importance of a government legal officer when giving an opinion to his government.
The legal officer should be prepared to tell the decisionmakers whether a particular proposed action conforms to norms of constitutional law, how deep an inroad it would make, how difficult it would be to justify under law, how likely that justification would be accepted, and which of the alternatives is a lesser or less clear violation. And the wise Head of Government will listen, if only because he knows that a violation of the accepted rules of law would disturb the peace and harmony of his country and bring corresponding responses and consequences.
The Star, I observe, is one of the few newspapers in our country with the grit to call a spade a spade. In its “Manual on Human Rights Monitoring”, the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner stipulates that participation in the electoral process cannot be effective unless a wide range of rights are respected, namely, freedom of expression and opinion, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom from discrimination, and freedom from fear and intimidation. Our Federal Constitution, under its Fundamental Rights provisions, contain similar rights.
The Star (April 29) reported Dr Mahathir’s claim that the jet aircraft that was to take him to Langkawi for a speaking engagement was sabotaged before takeoff.
“I should have arrived in Langkawi before Friday prayers but the plane was damaged. Luckily, the pilot was able to detect the damage – if not I would have died in a crash,” he said.
It is but trite that the first concern of every pilot is his own life. Unlike the kamikaze pilots of WWII, no pilot would fly a plane that would put his life in jeopardy.
On Jan 6, 2003, Air Midwest Airlines plane’s nose shot skyward after takeoff killing everyone on board. On Aug 26 the same year, because the plane’s nose was not properly maintained, another fatal crash occurred. By whatever scale a pilot is judged for his competency, Dr Mahathir’s pilot surely passed the test with flying colours!
Life during the regime of our former premier reminds me of George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour, where the citizens of superstate Oceania were victims of omnipresent government surveillance, similar, in my view, to the intents and purposes of our current Communications and Multimedia Commission 1998 Act. As in the novel, the majority of Malaysians were, prior to polling day, living in fear, with Big Brother keeping surveillance on us very much like in “Nineteen EightyFour”.
We now have Dr Mahathir and his small team of ministers and a Council of Eminent Persons of unquestionable integrity to assist them. He has vowed to fulfil Pakatan Harapan’s promises in the party manifesto during his term as premier. Let us give him our full support and not put any spanner in the works, especially by those from our ruling coalition.
To the leaders of our country’s political divide, the following quote from my beloved uncle and Malaysia’s first prime minister is worth emulating:
“... Politics are politics, rather like the bright light which can bring comfort as one of the amenities of life, but at the same time, the very brightness also attracts plenty of insects and parasites. Politics we must have. We cannot do without politics, just as we cannot do without light. But keep it clean.”
Every law student worth his salt knows that the Attorney General no longer remains an adviser to the King or the incoming prime minister once the caretaker government ceases to exist.