By Zaid Ibrahim
Charles Dickens was a great writer because he was such an astute observer of human affairs. Read any of his books and you will find not only great wisdom but also a piercing analysis of human foibles.
His frequent jibes at the injustices of 19th-century England were the crux of Oliver Twist, in which his now famous line “the law is an ass” was an indictment of a legal system where rules and procedures took precedence over justice and common sense.
Fast forward to 21st century Malaysia, and lo and behold, you can see the same penchant for rules and procedures, to the detriment of justice itself.
Look at what the Federal Court did a few days ago: they ruled that if you are appealing to the Court of Appeal and have a few interlocutory applications, then you need to file separate notices of appeal. It does not matter that these applications are in respect of the same subject matter. By this decision, the case involving private investigator P. Bala’s widow, A. Santamil Selvi, was struck off, overruling the Court of Appeal’s decision to allow the matter to go for trial in the High Court.
Briefly, Bala was connected to the Altantuya murder case. Selvi alleged that carpet dealer Deepak Jaikishian and eight others forcibly removed her family from their home and exiled them to India for five long years.
Selvi named the Prime Minister as one of the group of eight. We will only find out why the PM wanted to remove Bala from the country if we can hear the full story from Selvi, but that will not happen now that her case has been struck off.
Why is the Federal Court unwilling to allow her case to be heard on merit when the Court of Appeal thought otherwise? Was the breach of the “rule” applicable to appeals to the Court of Appeal so fundamental to the administration of justice that the Court of Appeal’s own discretion could not be allowed to stand?
One also wonders why the Federal Court was even interested to hear the application from the group of eight (even if they were represented by Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah) when the Court of Appeal had already struck out the case against them, and had only allowed the case against Deepak to stand trial. The group of eight should not have been allowed to address the court because this was none of their business. Or was it?
I hope Selvi will pursue her claim regardless. I am curious to know if you can indeed be exiled from this country just because your Statutory Declaration upsets the Prime Minister.
I also hope the Federal Court takes heed of Dickens’s advice and not make an ass of the law. Let the widow have her day in court. After all, our clever judges would be able to tell easily if the claim is frivolous or false after hearing the matter. What they shouldn’t do is enter striking out mode to deny Selvi her chance to tell us her story. It could well be a ridiculous claim—or it could be another tragic instance of human suffering in this land of plenty.
Zaid Ibrahim is a former law minister.
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