1. THE DESTRUCTION OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE

Mahathir was continually upset with the Judiciary because the verdicts
in a number of cases went against the Government. According to Deputy
PM, Datuk Musa Hitam, one of his favourite slogans was "Hang the
Lawyers! Hang the Judges!" From 1987, he intensified his verbal
attacks against the Judiciary in the news media, making damaging
statements which clearly demonstrated that he did not understand the
role of the Judiciary as being independent from the Executive and
Legislative arms of Government. That the Judiciary exists as a
check-and-balance against the excesses of the Executive appeared to have
been a concept he never fully grasped. Instead, he accused judges of the
sort of political interference that would result in confusion and loss
of public confidence in the Government. Hence, to curtail the powers of
the Judiciary and subsume it beneath the Executive became one of his
cherished dreams.
In April 1987, after an UMNO leadership contest in which Mahathir very
nearly lost to Finance Minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, there were
allegations that several delegates who had voted were drawn from
branches not properly registered under the Societies Act 1966. An appeal
was filed by eleven UMNO delegates to have the elections declared null
and void. This was a very serious matter for Mahathir because if the
appeal succeeded, fresh elections would have to be held and he might
lose. The matter finally came before Justice Harun Hashim of  KL High
Court who ruled that under the existing law, he had no choice but to
declare not just the elections invalid, but the whole of UMNO an
unlawful society as well. The country and, more particularly, UMNO, went
into a state of shock.
In most modern democracies, a political catastrophe of this magnitude
would have result in the immediate resignation of the party's President
and Prime Minister. But Mahathir did not resign. He informed the country
that the Government would continue running the country. Opposition
Leader Lim Kit Siang and Tunku Abdul Rahman called for a vote in
Parliament to establish Mahathir's legitimacy but those calls were
ignored. Mahathir then set in motion the machinery to form a new
surrogate party called UMNO Baru. His opponents, however, wanted the old
party revived. The eleven UMNO delegates then launched an appeal in the
Supreme Court to have the 1987 elections alone declared illegal and the
party not an unlawful society.
Mahathir fully understood the danger to him of this pending appeal. He
had to act quickly. In October 1987, he launched the notorious Operation
Lalang in which at least 106 people were arrested and detained without
trial under the ISA, including three very articulate critics, the
Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang, political scientist Dr. Chandra
Muzaffar and leading lawyer Karpal Singh. The official reason for the
arrests was that a highly dangerous security situation had arisen but
this has been strongly disputed as nothing more than a shameless
fabrication. The broad sweep included even environmentalists and
Consumer Association spokesmen. Four of the most outspoken newspapers
-The Star, The Sunday Star, Watan and Sin Chew Jit Poh - had their
publishing licences suspended. When, after five months, the papers were
free to publish again, they were no longer the same.
Mahathir's next move was to push through Parliament far-reaching
amendments to the Constitution so that the Executive gained in power
enormously at the expense of the Judiciary. There was general
indignation at this rude behaviour which shocked a good many people. The
indecent haste and the fact that the amendments were made at a time when
the Government's main critics were in detention, including the
Opposition Leader and six vocal MPs and outspoken newspapers demoralized
added further to the appalling injustice of the situation. Tunku Abdul
Rahman, Malaysia's beloved first Prime Minister, put it succinctly:
"It was legal, but was it just?" Others noted angrily that the
Constitution had been raped once again. In a speech, the outgoing
President of the Bar Council, Param Cumaraswamy, said:
"The Prime Ministe's vile and contemptuous allegations, and the
accusations levelled at the Judiciary and our judges left many shocked
beyond belief. His speech which was full of venom, hate and spite with
no substance whatsoever, illustrated his complete and total ignorance of
the role of the Judiciary and the judicial process itself. He has indeed
defiled and defaced the Constitution. It is surprising that those 142
MPs who voted in favour, after taking the oath that they would preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution, had no compunction about destroying
one of its basic structures."
One visiting parliamentarian was astonished at the lack of public
debate. In his own country, he said, such amendments would have taken
years.
Next, after having curbed the independence of the Judiciary, Mahathir
set about destroying its integrity. This was the removal of Tun Salleh
Abas as Lord President in 1988, a move which Tunku Abdul Rahman
described as "the most shocking story in modern legal and judicial
history,"

2. THE DESTRUCTION OF JUDICIAL INTEGRITY

Tun Salleh Abas was a man of humble origins - his father was a sailor
and small village trader - who rose to become Lord President, the
highest judge in the land and head of the Judiciary while remaining a
deeply religious man.
By March 1988, Mahathir's scandalous and violent public attacks on the
Judiciary had so provoked the judges that Tun Salleh was obliged to call
a conference. Twenty judges met in the Supreme Court one week after the
debilitating and shameful Constitutional amendments were made. By
unanimous agreement, a letter was drafted to the King (also the Sultan
of Johore) and copied to all Sultans, expressing disquiet over various
comments made by the Prime Minister. The letter was delivered on 25
March and Tun Salleh left soon after for medical treatment in the United
States followed by a pilgrimage to Mecca. He had a most important duty
to perform upon his return: he fixed the hearing of the crucial UMNO
Eleven appeal for June and, because of its overwhelming significance,
decided that a full coram of nine Supreme Court judges should hear this.
Three days later, Tun Salleh was suspended from his official capacity by
the King on recommendation of the Prime Minister. In the same hour th!
at he received the suspension letter, the Acting Lord President, Tan Sri
Abdul Hamid took the UMNO Eleven case out of the calendar so that the
link between the two was difficult to deny.
Tun Salleh's suspension came after he refused to bow to Mahathir's
pressure to either resign or retire, even though financial inducements
were offered, including mention of a lucrative job in the International
Development Bank in Jeddah. The initial reason given for the suspension
was that the King had taken great displeasure over the letter Tun Salleh
had written on behalf of all judges.  According to official records
prepared by the Attorney General, the King had requested Tun Salleh's
removal in an audience with the Prime Minister on the Wednesday morning
of 1 May 1998 after the weekly Cabinet Meeting.
There are serious doubts as to whether this audience actually took
place. The first of May 1998 fell on a Sunday, not Wednesday as the
Attorney General recorded. Even if the day of week were corrected, there
can be no Cabinet meeting on a Sunday. That the King expressed great
displeasure only on 1 May, when he had in fact received the letter on 25
March cast further doubt over this assertion. It is difficult to believe
that the King wanted Tun Salleh removed purely because he had protested
about the public insults directed against the entire Judiciary by the
head of the Executive. In any event, royal displeasure would not be a
constitutionally valid ground for dismissal. Indeed, Mahathir advised
the King as much in a letter written four days after this probably
fictitious audience; however, the Prime Minister went further in the
same letter to say that he would investigate Tun Salleh for any evidence
of misbehaviour. In any event, the King did not clear up the mystery
and, in !
an audience with Tun Salleh, actually asked the latter to step down
without giving reasons although the Conference of Rulers had already
asked for his reinstatement. Amazingly, Tun Salleh was suspended and a
Tribunal set up to determine his fate before any formal charges were
laid.
The Constitution does not provide for the removal of a Lord President.
While the Tribunal need not be an inappropriate means, its composition
was to say the least, disgraceful. It was composed of six acting and
retired judges, although the Constitution required an odd number to
prevent deadlock. Of these -four from Malaysia, one from Sri Lanka and
one from Singapore -only the Sri Lankan enjoyed a rank comparable to Tun
Salleh's. This was contrary to the very reasonable dictum that one
should be tried by one's peers rather than one's juniors. The fact that
two retired Lord Presidents of Malaysia were available but not invited
was glaring. There were grave conflicts of interest with three of the
Malaysian judges that should have disqualified them from sitting: Tan
Sri Abdul Hamid who was next in line to succeed as Lord President and
who had also participated in the conference of 20 judges which resulted
in the letter to the King; Tan Sri Zahir who, being also the Speaker of
the!
 Lower House, was beholden to Mahathir, the principal complainant in the
matter at hand; and Tan Sri Abdul Aziz who, although a former judge, was
then a practising lawyer and, more incredibly, had two suits pending
against him at that time. But Tun Salleh's objections were ignored and
when the Bar Council issued a statement calling for the Tribunal to be
re-constituted, both the New Straits Times and The Star refused to
publish it. Further, it was decided that the Tribunal would sit in
closed sessions although Tun Salleh had requested a public hearing.
The charges, when finally published, were manifestly absurd. Running
over 12 sheets of paper, it was clear that quantity had been substituted
where quality was lacking, and some of them actually related to Tun
Salleh's behaviour after suspension. Many of them related to his
speeches and press interviews, whereby sinister meanings were imputed to
various innocuous comments that he had made. To cite an instance, in a
speech at the University of Malaya, he had said: "The role of the
courts is very important to bring about public order. If there is no
public order there will be chaos in this country and if there is chaos,
no one can feel safe" On this basis, Tun Salleh was charged with
making statements criticizing the Government which displayed prejudice
and bias against the latter. Another statement of his, "In a
democratic system, the courts play a prominent role as agent of
stability but they can perform this function only if judges are
trusted," resulted in the charge that he!
 had ridiculed the Government by imputing that it did not trust the
judges. These charges were doubly ludicrous in the light of Mahathir's
many poisonous attacks against the Judiciary.
It is not surprising that Tun Salleh, after reading this catalogue of
fantasy crimes, refused to appear before what was so evidently a
kangaroo court. The Tribunal, after refusing representations made by
Raja Aziz, Tun Salleh's leading counsel, that it had no constitutional
validity to sit, chose instead to proceed so hastily that it wound up
deliberations, including the examination of witnesses with just four
hours work. As it prepared to issue its Report, Tun Salleh's lawyers
sought an urgent stay of proceedings in the High Court. This would
normally be granted immediately at the least possibility that an
injustice may be about to be done but, here, events turned into utter
farce.
Instead of immediately reaching a decision as expected, the presiding
judge, Datuk Ajaib Singh, after the court had been in languorous session
the whole day that Friday, adjourned hearings for 9.30 am the next day.
On Saturday however, the judge emerged in court only at 11.50 am and,
even then, postponed hearings again for the Monday! In desperation, Tun
Salleh's lawyers, knowing that the Tribunal could easily release its
Report before then, sought the assistance of Supreme Court judge, Tan
Sri Wan Suleiman, in his Chambers. The latter agreed to hear them in
open court in half an hour's time and called a coram of all remaining
Supreme Court, one of whom, Tan Sri Hashim Yeop, refused to sit. The
soap opera reached an apogee of ridiculousness when Tan Sri Abdul Hamid,
head of the Tribunal and Acting Lord President, gave orders for the
doors of Supreme Court to be locked and for the seal of the Supreme
Court to be secreted away!
Undeterred, the five Supreme Court judges ordered the policeman on duty
to open the door forthwith. After less than half an hour, the Court
ordered the Tribunal not to submit any recommendation, report or advice
to the King. Tun Salleh's lawyers were typing the Order to serve
personally to the Tribunal at Parliament House when news arrived that
the gates of Parliament House had been locked! At this point, Justice
Wan Suleiman rose to the occasion and, calling the office of the
Inspector General of Police, told a senior officer that any impediment
to serving the Order would constitute contempt of court. The gates of
Parliament swung open and, at 4 pm, Raja Aziz and his team served the
Order to the Tribunal members who were found to be still hard at work on
a word-processor that Saturday afternoon. All six members accepted
service without complaint.
It would appear that justice had at last prevailed but, four days later,
all five Supreme Court judges were suspended. Almost every rule that was
broken to suspend Tun Salleh was broken again to suspend them. The
prohibition order they had made were revoked within days. A second
Tribunal eventually reinstated three of the judge: Tan Sri Azmi
Kamaruddin, Tan Sri Eusoff Abdoolcader and Tan Sri Wan Hamzah but Tan
Sri Wan Suleiman and Datuk George Edward Seah were removed from office.
The UMNO Eleven case was quickly dismissed. The removal of Tun Salleh
also saw the resignation of Deputy PM Datuk Musa Hitam who, according to
popular wisdom, could no longer stomach Mahathir's ways.

The facts in this summary are derived from the book "May Day for
Justice" by Tun Salleh Abas with K. Das, Magnus Book Kuala Lumpur,
1989.

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