Taking Back Our Judiciary

The following is extracted from the online petition initiated by The People's Parliament. Please read the full text of the petition and if you agree with it, sign the petition here.

We, the rakyat, have been very anxious that the requisite reforms to the Judiciary be given effect to so as to restore the same as a truly independent arm of government, free from any sort of interference from Executive so that the former could perform its constitutional role as the defender of the rakyat. We were as such gratified with the media reports that the Law Minister, Dato Zaid Ibrahim, was treating the matter of the establishment of a Judicial Appointments Commission as a matter of priority. We, the rakyat, are now gravely disappointed with recent media reports that several Cabinet ministers, notably from UMNO, have rejected the proposal by the Law Minister for the establishment of the Judicial Appointments Commission and that the Law Minister had recently confirmed that there would now not be sufficient time during the present sitting of Parliament to table a bill for the purposes of establishing the Judicial Appointments Commission. We, the rakyat, also note and endorse the concerns of the Law Minister that the appointment to the post of Chief Justice, which falls vacant on 18th October, 2008 upon the retirement of the present Chief Justice Tun Abdul Hamid Mohamad, should ideally be done as transparently as might have been had the Judicial Appointments Commission been set up and entrusted with that task. We, the rakyat, note that in September last year, the Prime Minister had recommended and Your Majesty had consented to the appointment of Tan Sri Dato’ Zaki Tun Azmi directly to the Federal Court, by-passing several senior judges of the Court of Appeal. Then in December last year, whilst Tan Sri Dato’ Zaki had barely completed three months into his appointment as a judge of the Federal Court, the Prime Minister had again recommended and Your Majesty had consented to the appointment of Tan Sri Dato’ Zaki to the position of President of the Court of Appeal, this time bypassing several far more senior judges of the Federal Court. We, the rakyat, note with concern that the rapid rise of Tan Sri Dato’ Zaki through the judiciary, inexplicably over the heads of many more senior members, is reminiscent of the episode in which Tun Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim bypassed the more senior late Tan Sri Malek Ahmed to the position of President of the Court of Appeal, an episode that became the subject-matter of scrutiny by the Royal Commission of Inquiry earlier this year. ...more http://www.petitiononline.com/6ai18u26/petition.html