So can I leave or not?
If the government can grant complete authority to a department head to allow or stop a Malaysian from travelling abroad, we have reached an unparalleled level of autocracy.
By Hafidz Baharom
I’m perplexed by the recent news report that the director-general of the Immigration Department has the final say on whether or not a Malaysian can leave the country.
Firstly, I’m wondering how he has not yet resigned after 15 of his staff were fired after it was exposed that the immigration system (myIMMs) had been hacked.
Not to mention the multiple Malaysians who somehow managed to bypass immigration security checks to evade the authorities, including blogger Alvin Tan.
Was this not under the director-general’s purview?
Yet now, he is given absolute authority to determine if Malaysians can leave or not?
This is truly perplexing, especially with government politicians in the past and even now telling Malaysians who criticise them to get out of the country. How is it the immigration department is now saying critics must stay in Malaysia?
Isn’t that just downright confusing?
If Malays can be confused by a cross on a building, Taoist shrines in public parks, or even bottles of water… well, this just adds to the confusion, doesn’t it?
Shouldn’t the Immigration Department then help lessen such confusion by just making their “no exit” blacklist public?
Doesn’t the department have to provide proper justification other than the standard “orders from above”?
Or is there a legal provision somewhere which can be used to sue the department and the government over loss of income and revenue, if it were a business trip?
Also, what’s the definition of “criticising the government”?
Would it include those with an offensive tweet, Facebook status, some random words said at a public forum or even at some obscure mamak restaurant during regular bitching sessions among friends?
Would it include me writing this letter to the press?
I beg for clarification on this matter because it just seems ridiculous that our guaranteed rights to travel freely under the Federal Constitution have now been absolutely put in the hands of one man who does not even have to provide proper justification for his actions.
We have lived throughout the decades as a nation with very few limitations on travelling, with politicians telling us to leave if we aren’t happy, and yet here we are told that those options are no longer available to us.
Thus, one has to ask: is the government and the Immigration Department now so concerned over words uttered overseas that they wish to insulate the nation from the rest of the world?
Is that why the Immigration Department is given such absolute authority?
Is it also why the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission is given the absolute authority to censor blogs and websites under the Multimedia Act?
Frankly speaking, isn’t this the same tactic used by Sabah and Sarawak as well, which was guaranteed by the Malaysia Agreement?
Yet those two are legally justified. Under what legal basis does the Immigration Department have such authority?
Care to share that information with the public?
But let us face reality. If this government is running scared to the point of granting absolute authority to a department head regardless of absolute power corrupting, then we are definitely reaching an unparalleled level of autocracy.
And if this is truly the same Malaysia that was the home of our forefathers, then it is a far cry from what they envisioned this country to be.
Hafidz Baharom is an FMT reader.
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