Malaysia is still reeling from the many shocks reverberating from the expose of the Lingam Tape — confirming what had been widely talked about concerning the perversion of the course of justice in the fixing of judicial appointments and court judgments but also from the responses from the Executive and Judiciary.
Both the Executive and the Judiciary had come out of the Lingam Tape scandal with their reputation in tatters.
The thunderous ten-day silence of the Chief Justice, Tun Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim has completely drowned out the puny denial which the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz had made on the Chief Justice’s behalf.
In the 50-year history of the nation, one top judicial officer had been sacked from his office but he retained national and international respect for his honour and integrity. However, two other top judicial officers who completed their term of office did so under a black cloud and nobody would have thought there would be a third top judicial officer who would be exiting from office in ignominy.
The Executive on its part had brought the whole system of democratic governance into a tragic-comedy of errors — not least of which was the decision to set up a so-called “Independent Panel” to investigate into the authenticity of the Lingam Tape and headed by someone who is tainted by his role in the “mother” of all judicial crisis in the past 19 years, the 1988 Judicial Crisis.
Even now, the term of reference of the so-called “Independent Panel” into the Lingam Tape has not been fully made public. What is there so secretive that its actual term of reference is still being kept a secret?
But it is Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of law and justice, who has wrought the greatest harm to the system of governance in Malaysia. Continue reading “How did Nazri (Protocol No. 16) become Minister for Ahmad Fairuz, when CJ is No. 11 on protocol list?”