The team comprised former law minister Nazri Aziz, health minister Dr S Subramaniam, who is MIC president, and Islamic affairs minister Jamil Khir Baharom, according to the New Straits Times.
Their names were given by Azalina Othman Said, minister in the prime minister’s department. The three ministers were reported to have been chosen by the Cabinet at its meeting on Wednesday and had met the Attorney-General the next day to find a resolution of the case.
Indira’s former husband, who converted to Islam, had unilaterally converted them as well in 2009. She has fought a long drawn-out court battle to obtain custody of her daughter and rescind the children’s conversion.
In 2010 the High Court awarded her full custody and a recovery order but her husband has failed to comply with the order.
Azalina said the children in this custody dispute should not be victimised. “Everyone has been affected by this case and I, as a former shariah lawyer, feel strongly about it. It is not right for the children to be victimised,” she said, according to the NST report.
The case has split the justice system, pitting the civil courts against the syariah court system.
Last week another former law minister, Zaid Ibrahim, had described as “heartless” a Court of Appeal decision denying Indira custody of her daughter, unilaterally converted to Islam at the age of two by her father Muhammad Riduan Abdullah (formerly K Pathmanathan), who also took her away to live with him.
The decision was also criticised by the Jihad for Justice society, whose chairman, Thasleem Mohamad Ibrahim, said at a forum that the judges should have looked at the case on humanitarian grounds.
“They should at least have had the consent of the mother, which they didn’t. The three children did not even recite the basic shahadah during their conversion,” he said.
In the appeal case, Judge Hamid Sultan Abu Backer, who made a dissenting judgement, called for special courts to be created in the states, to deal with disputes involving Muslims and non-Muslims.