Mustafar (third left) leads Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Adenan Satem (second left) and Second Minister of Resource Planning and Environment Datuk Amar Awang Tengah Ali Hasan (left) to the plenary session of the 16th IACC.
PUTRAJAYA: Malaysians can set up a board to get connected to the judiciary of the country and ask the judiciary why some of the judgments seemed unfair and show that they don’t have confidence in the judicial system.
The suggestion came from the president of the Federal Supreme Tax Court of Germany, Prof Dr H C Rudolf Mellinghoff, after addressing at the session on ‘Assessing Corruption Risks in the Judiciary: What role for the community?’ at the 16th International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) in Putrajaya International Convention Centre here yesterday.
During the session, a Malaysian participant to the three-day conference asked what options the community who had lost confidence in the judiciary of the country had in order to restore their confidence in the judicial system.
The participant claimed there were recent cases where judges were biased in their judgements, citing the overturning of the High Court judgement on the delineation exercise in Sarawak and appointment of new attorney-general and other matters in regards to the investigation into 1MDB as a few of the examples.
Mellinghoff when asked by The Borneo Post for comments, however, declined to comment as he did not have the details of the various cases mentioned but offered his advice to create a board to get contacted to the Judicial Department.
Malaysia ranked 39th with a score of 0.57 in the World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index 2015, an annual report that measures how the rule of law is experienced by the general public in 102 countries worldwide, released in June this year.
Director of Programs of World Justice Project, USA Radha Friedman said the top three overall performers in the WJP Rule of Law Index 2015 were Denmark, Norway and Sweden and the bottom three were Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Venezuela.
Friedman was one of the panel speakers of the session. Other speakers included Haemiwan Zumar Fathony who is the former deputy coordinator of Judicial Reform Team office in Indonesia and Chief Judge of High Court of Nigeria Justice Kashim Zannah.
Meanwhile, Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) deputy chief commissioner (Prevention) Datuk Mustafar Ali said corrupt practices cost the country approximately two per cent of the GDP.
“It indicates the corruption practices do not only disrupt individual businesses but have far wider impacts across national, social and economic development.”
Mustafar also quoted The Ernst & Young 12th Global Fraud Survey in 2013 that 88 per cent of respondents in Malaysia were in favour of increasing corporate anti-corruption regulations in the private sector, compared with 60 per cent globally.
Addressing the session on ‘Fighting Corruption by Authorities: What worked and what went wrong’, he said MACC was committed to, among other things, make a study on political parties and political funding, disbursement of government allocation to members of Parliament, formalise political appointees at ministries and segregation of duties between secretary-generals and ministers.
The biennial conference organised by Institute of Transparency International Berlin in collaboration with Malaysian government and TI Malaysian Chapter and attended by some 1,000 participants started on Tuesday.