Instant open air ceramah

Next to the temple we found a concrete structure and went up onto it. Mano, Gana and myself addressed the crowd briefly. I told the crowd that “today’s arrest and prosecution is malicious”, “the prosecution was an abuse of powers by the Attorney General under the UMNO led Malaysian government’s instructions. In fact it had crossed my mind about ten years prior to this that when your take on the state at an “uncomfortable” level, they would use the Attorney General to do the clampdown as was done to previous leaders especially from the DAP and later to PKR leaders. The whole country knew that there was no basis to these charges but the almost absolute powers of the Attorney General in practice was yet again abused to tone us down. The power exercised by just one man i. e. the Attorney General for UMNO just to teach us a lesson and “to put us in our place”. To overcome these abuses I had thought and in fact in 2006 put up proposals via our NGO Police Watch and Human Rights Committee to the UMNO controlled Malaysian government that we should embrace a system of grand jury as practiced in the United States. Where a Jury made up of common people would decide as to whether a charge proposed by the Attorney General could stand in the first place before even the District Attorney is allowed to formally institute criminal prosecution in a Court of law. This system acts as a filter and a check and balance before even the Attorney General could proceed to prosecute an individual. In Malaysia even the local district police Inspector has the power to arrest,investigate and at the same time press charges on an individual which gives room for a lot of abuse,injustice and gross violations of human rights. Hundreds of thousands have served jail sentences by pleading guilty irrespective of whether they had or had not committed the crime accused of or because they may not have the bail money to bail themselves out or they did not have the money to pay lawyers to defend them in Courts. The most “practical” solution to their predicament at that moment in time irrespective of whether they are guilty or not would be to plead guilty and to serve time in jail and then carry a lifelong criminal record that comes with it. There is a serious failure of justice in Malaysia without a fully state funded legal aid system with bail furnished for especially the Indian poor who are the most grossly victimized by the police.