Be careful when making statements in public — Zaki
PUTRAJAYA: While judges should be careful when making statements in public, they are also not supposed to respond to the media when allegations are made against them, says former chief justice Tun Zaki Azmi.
He said apart from responding to the media in their grounds of judgment, judges had their opportunity to criticise when they delivered speeches at public functions such as seminars and conferences.
“I believe that when you come out with statements in the media on rare occasions, you tend to get more attention to the statements made. People tend to focus on you on those rare occasions,” he said in his speech at the launch of a book entitled, ‘A Matter of Justice, Selected Articles and Speeches of Tun Arifin Zakaria’ at the Palace of Justice here yesterday.
Zaki added that sometimes when judges had ideas about the law, they expressed views in their lectures and speeches but with a caveat that their opinion not be invoked in any judgment.
Sometimes, he said, judges should respond to the media, just like how Chief Justice Tun Arifin Zakaria yesterday had responded to a statement by a previous judge, in relation to corruption cases.
Zaki said the statement by the former judge was inaccurate as the courts had increasingly meted out more reasonable sentences on corruption offenders.
On Wednesday, Arifin – in response to a statement by former Court of Appeal judge Datuk Mohd Noor Abdullah that judges were soft in meting out sentences, especially in sentencing individuals convicted of corruption – had said former judges should not issue statements without supporting facts or statistics. — Bernama