Get rid of the Sedition Act now, says former A-G and lawyers

There are enough laws to prosecute those who make disparaging racial and religious remarks but selective investigation and prosecution is a cause for worry, a former attorney-general and lawyers said.

Insisting that the Sedition Act be removed from the statute book, they said the law on sedition was stacked against an accused and it gave the prosecution an upper hand in obtaining a conviction.

They said this in response to Suhakam chairman Tan Sri Hasmy Agam’s call to Putrajaya that the Sedition Act be repealed and replaced with a National Harmony Act as promised by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak in 2012.

Hasmy said recently, several opposition politicians had been prosecuted for allegedly making “seditious remarks” but the Suhakam chairman noted that there were other laws which could have been used to handle such matters.

Hasmy (pic, left) said Suhakam recognised that freedom of speech had its limits but Putrajaya must uphold the principle of equality.

Former attorney-general Tan Sri Abu Talib Othman said there was no point enacting new laws when the implementation was questionable.

“Every person is equal under our law. To be effective, all laws must be enforced fairly ,” said Talib who was the A-G between 1980 and 1993.

He said these days many were charged with sedition and there was a public perception of selective prosecution.

Talib said he had framed charges against a few individuals under the Sedition Act but it was done fairly to obtain a conviction.

He expressed reservation on the prosecution of DAP national vice-chair Teresa Kok over her controversial satirical video “Onederful Malaysia” last February.

“Is this case a suitable benchmark for sedition in this country?” he asked.

Talib, who is also a former Suhakam chairman, added that there were also adequate laws to maintain public order and national security.

Criminal lawyer Datuk Baljit Singh Sidhu said the prosecution of opposition leaders for sedition only lent support that the law was used to muzzle legitimate dissent.

He said Putrajaya would have done its homework before Najib announced the repeal of the law.

“Yet, the public prosecutor sees it fit to charge opposition leaders and those against the establishment over the past one year.”

He said the conduct of current Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail ran contrary to the promise made by Najib.

Lawyer Edmund Bon (pic, right) said there were sufficient provisions in the Penal Code and also the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Act 1988 to act against those who used race and religion to make hate speech.

“I am for responsible freedom of speech but against using the Sedition Act,” he said.

Bon said under the sedition law, it was a presumption that the accused was responsible for inciting hatred when the burden of proof in criminal law was always with the prosecution.

“During trial, the prosecution need not prove intention of the accused and this makes it easier for them to secure a conviction.”

Lawyer Abd Shukor Ahmad said the intention of the sedition law, which originated in England, no longer existed.

“It was enacted to curb anyone from making derogatory remarks against the state during the reign of absolute monarchy,” he said.

Shukor said the law had lost its relevance in a parliamentary democracy and open government system.

“We are still stuck in a time warp if the law remained in our statute book,” Shukor said, adding that the legislation was against basic rights of citizens to criticise their elected government or offer differing views.

Lawyers for Liberty executive director Eric Paulsen said individuals would be reluctant to make hate speech using race and religion if they were reprimanded severely by the media, community and political leaders.

“These individuals will think twice to use race and religious card to champion an issue,” he said.

Paulsen, however, lamented that these individuals became bolder because they obtained tacit support from politicians and the mainstream media.

He said offenders could be charged under the Penal Code as it gave them a fair level of playing field in putting up a defence unlike the Sedition Act.

http://anwaribrahimblog.com/2014/05/21/get-rid-of-the-sedition-act-now-say-former-a-g-and-lawyers/

Egypt: 2013 in review

N.B. This is not an attempt at an exhaustive run down of everything that happened in Egypt in 2013. Firstly, that would take too long and, more importantly, people have already done that for you. Here. This is a run down of memorable momentsfrom 2013 that I had a hand in covering. 
Egypt’s annus horribilis started poorly and got worse. It was the year the popular revolution asking for bread, freedom and social justice was finally squished under the boots of the military, the year liberals showed their true colours by openly supporting a military coup they knew full well would usher in a murderous phase of tyranny not seen since…well, since the military was last in power in Egypt. It was the year a boy was jailed for having a ruler; where a group of girls who had protested in Alexandria were jailed for 11 years. Even Bassem Youssef was banned.
2013 was the year the revolution died.
January

At least 30 people are killed and hundreds are injured in clashes in Port Said and two Nile Delta cities following the sentencing to death of 21 football fans accused of killing Ahly supporters in the Port Said football massacre in 2012. Most of the deaths came after a group of relatives of defendants attempted to storm the city’s main prison and torched police buildings.
Having been one of the first reporters on the scene in Port Said in the hours after the 2012 massacre, I can tell you that there was no quarter given to Ahly fans as they were butchered, shot and thrown from the bleachersby people who came from the Masry end of the ground. The police did less than nothing. It was a massacre – and it annoys me when it gets termed “clashes” or merely “violence.” Anyway.
A day later, President Mohammed Morsi declares a state of emergency in threeSuez Canal governorates and repeats his call for national dialogue with the National Salvation Front (the opposition that only knew how to boycott). It refuses. Morsi, during a televised speech, praises the efforts of the police and the armed forces.
February 

Destroying any lingering chance of boosting Egypt’s dire tourism economy, a hot air balloon crashes in the southern town of Luxor, Upper Egypt, killing 19 people.
March
At least seven people are killed in sectarian violence between Coptic Christian and Muslim residents of the town of Al-Khosous, north of Cairo. A subsequent clash outside a funeral in Cairo kills at least another one.
April/May
Following pressure from opposition groups, Morsi announces nine new ministers in a cabinet shuffle that fails to assuage the wrath of liberal and Salafist parties. Their main criticism is that the reshuffle fails to demote Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim, whom Morsi installed at the start of the year. (That decisionprobably comes back to bite Morsi post-July. Don’t read ahead or you’ll spoil it).
June
Three days before a planned mass protest organised by a group called Tamarod (more on them later) Morsi, inanother televised speech, announces the formation of a cross-party committee to review his apparently universally unpopular 2012 constitution and pledges, among other things: 4bn EGP development of the Sinai, raising the minimum wage to 700 EGP and the distribution of ration cards for the very poor.
All of which, you’d think, sound like good ideas. But people have stopped listening by this point. The army-backed Tamarod – funded and accommodated by felul businessmen and advised by senior members of Mubarak’s entourage - have grabbed the default sympathy of the liberal elite, who then proceed to claim (and preposterously are believed) that 30 million people marched against Morsi on June 30. I mean, you actually had normally sensible people repeat this. Credulously. (For people who prefer calculation to wild speculation, the maximum number of protesters you can fit in all Egypt’s main squares at any one time – using simply algebra – is 2.8 million).
If only there was a way to reliably and democratically calculate the number of supporters and opponents a given individual or party has. Oh, yep. I remember: Elections! (Morsi and the MB won five of them. Tamarod and every other liberal/felul party combined? Zero). But, as you’ll see throughout the last six months of 2013, people will tell you elections don’t mean anything. They say so with a straight face and still claim to value democracy.
July

This photo was taken on Qasr al-Nile Bridge, Cairo, at the very moment people were saying that the July 3 overthrow of Mohammed Morsi, was not a coup.
To precisely no one’s surprise – especially the army-backed Tamarod – General Abdel Fatah al Sisi announces a coup, giving Morsi 48 hours to abdicate. Tanks roll through the street, state TV and media buildings are stormed by military police and the sitting president is placed under house arrest. Yet apparently it’s not a coup. It’s a “revolutionary moment.”
In the ensuing hours, dozens of journalists are rounded up and arrested, Muslim Brotherhood members are hunted down on the streets (as some of more transparently felul “liberals” had fantasised about), arrest warrants are issued and Sisi and his SCAF return to unalloyed, unaccountable power. It’s not long before the murders begin, as we knew they would, as some people tried to stop and many “influencers” goaded on.
You can read my full thoughts on this (and by thoughts, read “total disgust” here.

In the early hours of July 8, 51 Muslim Brotherhood supporters are shot dead by security forces outside the headquarters of the Republican Guards in Cairo. At the time, coup supporters were keen to frame this massacre as a provoked attack. Some of the more famous ones said the deaths were a Muslim Brotherhood publicity stunt(he went on to win a press freedom award, naturally). Anyway, the facts are the facts, and thanks to excellent investigative work by several, including The Guardian’s Patrick Kingsley, the lie the liberals peddled was exposed. Security forces attacked with murderous force on unarmed protesters. And still, it wasn’t a coup. (Some choicer pro-massacre tweets from liberals can be seen here, here and here).
Repeated massacres of civilian protesters then occur.
August

By now, hundreds of protesters have been shot dead on the streets by security forces. This doesn’t stop US Secretary of State John Kerry from declaring, in spite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Egypt’s army are restoring democracy. It must have been the part where the army forcibly overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected president, declared martial law and began the pogrom of any dissenters that made up Kerry’s mind.
On August 14, and after goading from the liberal elites (comme toujours) the Egyptian army and police services disperse two pro-Morsi sit in protests at Nahda and Rabaa al-Adawiya squares in Cairo, killing at least 595 and as many as 2,600 civilian demonstrators.
Horrific accounts, photos and videos emerge of the worst single day of killing at the hands of security forces since the 2011 revolution.

You can read my reaction to the massacre everyone waited for here.
Dozens of churches were attacked, killing at least four people – acts many blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood directly. The massacre sparks further anti-coup protests and spawns perhaps the symbol of the anti-coup alliance, the raising of the four fingers (Rabaa meaning “four” in Arabic). And, of course, the coup government, being a little embarrassed about how much the world knows about all the people that it killed, cracks down on this freedom of expression, too.
One of Ahly’s best players is banned and put up for sale after celebrating a goal with a four fingered salute. A school boy is arrested after the sign is found on one of his rulers. They even arrest his father. Who could make this up? This is post-coup Egypt, fortunately, so you don’t have to.

A few days later, 120 protesters were killed after being fired upon by security forces in Ramses Square, Cairo.
And, to add further insult to the murder of protesters who died standing up for their freedom from tyranny, and as if further proof that Tamarod/SCAF executed the counter-revolution, former President Hosni Mubarak isreleased from prison.
September
SPY DUCK! (And spy stork).

And, continuing the regime’s bizarre anthropomorphic month, a man is arrested in Qena Province for naming his donkey Sisi.
October
More pro-Morsi demonstrations are brutally put down by Egyptian security services, with a single assault on another demonstration in Ramses Square killing 57.
And, proving that any “war on terror” is a self-fulfilling prophecy, Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim survives and assassination attempt that is immediately blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood (most of whom are arrested) and Morsi (who is in jail and appointed Ibrahim in the first place. Doesn’t matter. Anything bad that happens in Egypt is now the fault of the Islamists. “It’s just like the old days” I can hear the placated well-heeled “activists” of Zamalek purr.
November
Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s only democratically elected president sees a courtroom in a trial where he is accused of inciting the deaths of protesters outside the Presidential Palace last December, all of whom are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Go figure.
Deciding it’s tired of all the negative headlines (internationally, not in the press it controls, naturally) it gets from shooting endless protesters, the coup government decides it’s actually far easier to be done with the whole protesting thing altogether and bans demonstrations without prior consent (which means it bans all protests that aren’t staged shows of government support).
And to make absolutely sure people get the message (If you’re liberal/secularists and you protest, we’ll arrest you for the night; if you’re an Islamist and you protest we will shoot you or wreck your life) a court in Alexandria sentences 14 girls to 11 years in prison (EACH) for handing out fliers in the Mediterranean city. Puppet President Adly Mansour, after severe international condemnation, issues a presidential pardon.

December
After the bombing of a security headquarters in Mansoura, which kills 16 police officers, the Muslim Brotherhood is designated a terrorist organisation, just as it was under Gamal Abdel Nasser and subsequent military dictatorships. This is despite the organisation condemning the attack and the attack being claimed by a totally unaffiliated group. Again, this doesn’t matter: Sisi won 2013 and his gurning supporters cheered on his pogrom on the Islamists.
And, in the very manifestation of “when hell freezes over” snow fell in Cairo for the first time in 114 years.

2013 is the year Mubarakism returned and the year the felul got back in the saddle. It was the year the liberals reverted to their natural state of supporting secular autocracy backed by murder and torture of political opposition. The year, basically, where the military and social elite who had had their noses put out of joint by successive Islamist election wins decided democracy wasn’t ready for Egypt.
I hope everyone involved in the organisation, support, justification and explanation of 2013?s military coup and the orgy of murder, torture, arrest and intimidation it brought is proud of what they did this year. Because history certainly won’t be.

http://anwaribrahimblog.com/2014/01/04/egypt-2013-in-review/

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Imperial Understretch and the Fall of Great Powers

The sad, dangerous lessons of America’s budget standoff.

I’ve been thinking in recent days about doctrines of national decline. The fact that at the eleventh hour the U.S. Senate managed to paddle the canoe of state away from the thunderous cataract of default is hardly a sign that the United States has preserved its global standing. For one thing, Americans will find themselves witnessing the same melodrama in three months unless Congress agrees on a long-term fiscal plan, which seems, to put it gently, damn unlikely. For another, Americans have been stumbling in a fog of their own devising for the last generation or so. The end is not nigh; but the decline is.

The United States is exhibiting extremely idiosyncratic symptoms of great-power decline. Take the classic account of the subject, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Kennedy describes a syndrome, which afflicted the Roman Empire, imperial Spain, and Victorian England, among others, in which regional or global aspirations outstrip national capacities. Writing in 1987, Kennedy projected the United States as the latest victim of “imperial overstretch,” because “the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them simultaneously.”

That feels like the wrong diagnosis. First of all, unrestrained defense spending in the aftermath of 9/11 has not come close to bankrupting the United States, though it has certainly squandered precious resources. Second, Americans have contracted a severe case of indigestion from President George W. Bush’s vain attempt to swallow significant portions of the Middle East; they are now spitting out the remnants. Empire is an unnatural condition for the United States, and withdrawal to its continental fortress is an almost inevitable response to fears of overstretch. If anything, it is the new national suspicion of engagement, the mood of sullen disenchantment, that marks the country’s decline. Americans don’t want to shoulder the burdens of global leadership; they want the world, along with its demands, to go away.

We need a word more like “understretch” to describe the national condition. The problem does not lie with too-muchness abroad but with too-littleness at home. And the source of the problem is not an overambitious state but an implacable hostility to the operations of the state. Kennedy also writes that while America’s laissez-faire culture and economy make it better able to adjust to rapid change than are more dirigiste societies, doing so “depends upon the existence of a national leadership which can understand the larger processes at work in the world today.” The deliberations of Congress — not just in recent days but in recent years — vividly show the danger of wrongheaded leadership.

The near default, the shutdown of the government, the sequestration of budget funds — these are just the latest symptoms of a political, but also psychological, disease. The leadership of the Republican Party — and not just the Tea Party faction — believes that the federal government is bad. It has believed that at least since Newt Gingrich overthrew the party’s moderate leadership in 1994. In 2012, Mitt Romney, a Republican centrist, ran for president on a platform that would have reduced federal spending to 20 percent of GDP, 2 percentage points lower than it was during the time of small-government apostle Ronald Reagan — even though Medicare costs were a small fraction then of what they are today. (Matt Miller of the Washington Post has long been an eloquent voice on this madness, as for example here.) To accommodate deep tax cuts, Romney would have eliminated much of the federal government beyond the Pentagon. That is now the orthodoxy of one of America’s two political parties.

Meanwhile, the United States is falling behind in crucial areas where it led not long ago. The national store of human capital is diminishing as average rates of literacy and numerical understanding plummet in comparison with rates in other countries, as a recent OECD report demonstrated. A smaller percentage of Americans now both attend and graduate from college than in many Western countries. Crumbling infrastructure increases transaction costs; just compare the trip to JFKairport to the commute to almost any other global airport. The United States still leads the world in spending on research and development, but China has closed much of a formerly immense gap, and many countries now spend more as a percentage of GDP.

The United States is losing its position of global leadership because it is refusing to make investments that its competitors are making. In this regard, congressional Republicans may have lost the battle, but they’ve won the war. President Barack Obama agreed to accept the massive tax cuts his predecessor instituted in order to conclude a budget deal in 2011; since then, he has played on the Republican side of the field. Obama has never found, and perhaps will never find, the language needed to convince Americans that they cannot offer decent prospects to their children without a drastic change in priorities.

The best nibble at the edges, while the worst play with fire. In This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart catalog more than 70 cases of default on domestic debt over the last two centuries. On average, they note, in the year of default, inflation runs at 170 percent and the economy shrinks by 4 percent. In other words, default is so appalling a prospect that countries do it only when the economy is near collapse. And many of those countries, the authors note, are kleptocracies. The United States, by contrast, has a growing economy and no shortage of fiscal resources. No democratically unaccountable class was forcing the action. Washington came within a whisper of default on a whim: Political figures who do not believe in the government were delighted to throw a spanner in the works. Maybe they just wanted to see what would happen.

Great powers of the past have fallen behind when they failed to keep up with technological progress, as happened to 15th-century China; others have succumbed to invasion or disease. America faces none of these problems. The United States is a dynamic country that continues to attract immigrants and thus to grow and renew itself. It offers a unique scope to individual achievement. These great strengths certainly place a floor on any possible decline; perhaps they even argue that the United States can survive self-inflicted wounds that would doom a lesser nation. But another way of putting it is that America is posing a very dire test of its own powers of resilience.

If it’s not disease or invasion, then, what is it? Historian Edward Gibbon argued that Rome ultimately fell for moral reasons — because an ethos of patriotism and civic virtue gave way to selfishness and apathy (and lost out to the otherworldly focus of Christianity). Americans from the time of George Washington have worried that citizens would sink into a Roman torpor. That hasn’t quite happened either; Americans remain wedded to their republican virtues. Yet they don’t believe in the United States as an ongoing national project as they once did. Perhaps extreme inequality has loosened the strong stays of shared purpose so that we are predisposed to believe that virtue resides only in the individual, not in the community or collective. Thus, we redistribute resources to the individual, which of course only reinforces inequality. We respond to leaders who address us as separate, indissoluble atoms. Gibbon, who distrusted democracy, would probably say that Americans have become too individualistic.

I would say, instead, that there is a fine balance between the profound laissez-faire impulse that has made American the home of political and economic freedom, and the sense of shared citizenship that has fostered great collective efforts in the past — and that the country seems to have lost that balance. I would like to think that this latest brush with disaster will help right that balance — but I don’t believe it. Things will have to get worse before they get better.

http://anwaribrahimblog.com/2013/10/21/imperial-understretch-and-the-fall-of-great-powers/

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/18/imperial_understretch_and_the_fall_of_great_powers?page=0,0

Islam tidak ajar ganggu tempat ibadat agama lain, kata bekas Mufti

Bekas Mufti Perlis Datuk Dr Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin (gambar) menegaskan agama Islam tidak mengajar penganutnya untuk mengganggu tempat ibadat penganut agama lain.
Dr Mohd Asri, 42, yang dihubungi The Malaysian Insider bagi memberikan komen mengenai kontroversi serbuan Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor (Jais) serta rancangan berdemo di gereja Selangor, berkata walaupun semasa perang pun agama Islam melarang umatnya daripada menyentuh rumah ibadat.
“Dalam agama Islam, hatta dalam masa perang pun, orang yang sedang beribadat pun tidak boleh diganggu… inikan masa aman kenapa pula perlu diganggu?” kata Dr Mohd Asri.
Tengahari semalam, Jais menyerbu pejabat Persatuan Bible Malaysia (BSM) di Damansara Kim dan merampas kira-kira 320 Bible berbahasa Melayu dan Iban.
Dua pegawai BSM iaitu pengerusinya Lee Min Choon dan Sinclair Wong diarahkan ke Balai Polis Damansara untuk diambil keterangan mereka dan hanya dilepaskan dua jam kemudian.
Dalam pada itu, Umno Selangor juga telah mendesak Pengarang Herald, Paderi Lawrence Andrew, menarik balik kenyataannya yang tetap mahu menggunakan kalimah Allah di semua gereja di Selangor.
Umno Selangor juga merancang untuk mengadakan demonstrasi di hadapan pejabat Lawrence di Klang pada Ahad ini sekiranya tidak tunduk kepada desakan mereka.
Ketua Umno Shah Alam, Azhari Shaari berkata kenyataan paderi itu bertentangan dengan enakmen syariah negeri malah ia juga melanggar titah Sultan Selangor, Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, yang melarang penggunaan kalimah Allah oleh orang bukan Islam di negeri itu.
Dr Mohd Asri menyifatkan rancangan tersebut bukanlah berlandaskan ajaran Islam bahkan tidak mengajar penganutnya menyentuh mana-mana rumah ibadat bukan Islam.
“Agama Islam tidak pernah ajar penganutnya berbuat perkara-perkara begini, tempat-tempat ibadat Islam ajar supaya tidak sentuh.
“Apa yang mereka lakukan tersebut bukan berlandaskan ajaran Islam,” tambah Dr Mohd Asri lagi.
“Jangan sentuh tempat ibadat bukan Islam.”
Dalam pada itu, Ahli Jawatankuasa PAS Pusat Datuk Mujahid Yusof Rawa juga menggesa Putrajaya halang badan Islam keruhkan hubungan antara agama susulan kontroversi terbaru yang tercetus di Selangor baru-baru ini.
Beliau menyeru kerajaan merujuk Majlis Perundingan Perpaduan Kebangsaan yang ditubuhkan Kabinet baru-baru ini, yang dijangka mengadakan mesyuarat mengenai kontroversi penggunaan kalimah Allah pada Isnin depan.
Mujahid, yang turut dilantik Putrajaya sebagai ahli panel majlis tersebut, berkata insiden hari ini perlu dibincang pada mesyuarat itu.
Jelas beliau, badan agama Islam tidak harus bertindak oleh kerana isu penggunaan kalimah Allah masih dibicarakan di mahkamah.

http://anwaribrahimblog.com/2014/01/04/islam-tidak-ajar-ganggu-tempat-ibadat-agama-lain-kata-bekas-mufti/

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