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Malaysia's rights body marks unhappy
birthday
By Mustafa Ali
IPOH,
Malaysia - Instead of being showered with gifts and
bouquets on its third anniversary this week, Malaysia's
Human Rights Commission is getting criticisms from
activists who say it needs to do more to assert its
independence.
Caught between a rock and a hard
place, the commission, known by its Malaysian acronym
Suhakam, has been doing a balancing act - courting
popular appeal on the one hand while trying not to upset
the government of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on the
other.
Suhakam's record came under scrutiny when
non-government organizations (NGOs) reviewed its
performance over the past year at a meeting organized by
ERA Consumer Malaysia last week in Ipoh, about 160
kilometers northwest of Kuala Lumpur.
National
expectations were high on September 9, 1999, when
parliament gave birth to Suhakam, whose task it is to
recommend improvements to parliament about the state of
the nation's human-rights conditions.
The
commission has received good feedback for some of its
positions, including attempts to create more room for
itself in an environment where the government frowns on
political dissent. But it has been a source mostly of
disappointment for many civil-society groups present at
the Ipoh meeting.
"I was detained for 51 days. I
was stripped naked and blindfolded. But when they took
me to see the commission, it was blind and handcuffed
too. The only thing the commission asked me was whether
my food was okay," a member of the opposition party
Keadilan, who said he was detained without charge, told
the meeting of 200 NGOs and political party
representatives.
"Fifty-one days in detention
did not hurt me. It was Suhakam that hurt me," he said.
But if it is under fire from NGOs, the
commission's relevance and importance of its work has
also been belittled by the national parliament. In June,
its speaker rejected an opposition motion to take up
Suhakam's 2001 report on the grounds that it lacked
urgency to warrant being put on the agenda.
In
its 2001 report, carefully written given the sensitivity
of its position, the commission itself said that
people's right to a fair trial and right to peaceful
assembly have been severely curtailed in that previous
year. According to the report, detention without trial
under the colonial-era Internal Security Act (ISA) was
used by the government to deal with what it claimed were
threats to national security.
As a result, the
number of detainees under the ISA - originally drafted
to fight the communist insurgency and which allows the
detention without trial for two years - increased from
40 at the end of 2000 to 78 in 2001.
"While the
government justifies the ISA as a preventive detention
law to deal with threats to national security,
civil-society groups see it as a oppressive law which
can, and has been, abused to serve the political
interest of the government," the report said.
The commission also quoted figures from the Bar
Council Legal Aid Center in Kuala Lumpur, which said
that of the 800 people arrested under the ISA during
1998-2000, the majority were not charged. The majority
of those charged for attending an unlawful assembly were
either acquitted or discharged, showing "that those
people should not have been arrested in the first
place", the report said. Explaining that Suhakam is
caught in a difficult position in trying to do its job
without preference or favor, one of the human-rights
commissioners, Professor Chiam Heng Keng, said at the
meeting: "We do not dance to the tune of government or
NGOs."
But civil-society groups pointed out
several areas where the commission has let people down.
Irene Fernandez, president of Tenaganita, an NGO
working with migrant workers, said the commission's main
weakness lay in its investigative methods when it comes
to ISA cases. Fernandez said the commission's detention
visiting policy, under which officials are informed
ahead of a visit, needs to be scrapped. "When you
prior-inform, they clear up. You come back making
statement that situations are fine. This is disastrous
for me. The process of investigation has to be changed.
New methods must be brought in," said Fernandez.
The commission has also changed the process of
how it handles complaints from the public. Commissioners
no longer meet complainants personally and now have
full-time staff taking in the complainants, activists
said. But Chiam said commissioners do not always enough
time to meet with the public.
"This has created
bureaucracy instead of confidence," Fernandez said. "It
is only when you meet affected groups, will you be
sensitive" to their problems.
Student activist
Chang Lih Kang questioned the effectiveness of the
commission, saying that it had failed to protect student
activists who were among the most vulnerable to
human-rights violations under the Universities and
University Colleges Act. This law discourages students
from taking part in political activity, and some who do
have been dismissed from their universities. Chang said
it denies also students of their right of assembly and
freedom of speech.
Chang told the conference
that a student had once contacted the commission with a
complaint but rather than offer to meet the student, it
had sought to discuss the matter directly with the
university without the student being present. "Suhakam
must stop these bureaucratic process that stop it from
meeting people. It must give students a level playing
field," he said.
In response to questions posed
by activists, commissioner Chiam insisted that Suhakam
went about solving problems quietly, as it does when
handling cases involving student activists and the
universities.
"It is best for us not to shout
out, otherwise the government and the university will
not talk to us. We have to ask silently, so we are not
credited sometimes," she acknowledged.
(Inter
Press Service)
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