Imported laws from India during the 19th century
Our legal system is in need of reforms, points out Hamid Ibrahim. Our major criminal laws were imported from India, but while the laws in India and elsewhere have been reformed, ours are ripe for change.
Malaysia’s first Lord President (now known as Chief Justice) was invited by the A.I.R.and His Lordship delivered the V.V. Chitaley Memorial Lectures at the University of Nagpur on 7-8 February1980. Among other things, Tun Dr. Mohamed Suffian said and I quote:
Part I – Imported Laws: Laws imported from India during 19th Century
Thus even long before the arrival of colonists from Europe, Malaysia had been used to importing and accepting ideas from India, and it was painless for us to import, receive and accept legal concepts exported to us by the British via your country. These imports entered first the three British colonies on the sea and slowly seeped through to the Malaysia States on the peninsula after 1874, when the Treaty of Pangkor was signed with the Sultan of Perak, under which his state agreed to receive a British agent, the first Malay state to do so.
As earlier stated, during the period 1833 to 1867, the colony of the Straits Settlements was governed from India and during that period certain Acts of the Governor-General of India were applied to the Colony as part of India by virtue of statute 3 and 4 William IV c. 85. Examples are Acts on Wills, Slavery, Merchant Shipping, Parsee Marriage and Divorce, Supreme Court, Judicial Officers, Lunatics, and so on.
