By Yow Hong Chieh, The Malaysian Insider
Bar Council president Ragunath Kesavan and other lawyers have refuted the claim by the Selangor Islamic Religious Council (Mais) that the Selangor Sultan’s decrees have the power of law.
Ragunath cautioned that there is a difference between laws, which have to go through the state legislative assembly, and policies, which do not, and it was wrong for Mais to say the Sultan’s word was law in a letter to PKR’s Datuk Zaid Ibrahim who had disputed the contention.
“Law has to go through the [legislative] process… policy may not go through the process of legislative approval,” he explained to The Malaysian Insider.
“To say that it’s law? No, it’s not,” Ragunath said.
Zaid said on Saturday that he had received a letter from Mais chairman Datuk Setia Mohd Adzib stating, “any order or directive issued by His Majesty the Sultan… has the effect of the law and is enforceable as such without having the need for it to be gazetted”.
The letter was written in response to Zaid’s online post on the Selangor Sultan’s April 23 decree that state mosques not be used for political purposes.
The former de facto law minister had argued on his blog that the Sultan’s decree did not have the power of law.
Ragunath said that, because mosques are associated with religion, the mosque ban would not be against the state constitution as the Sultan has power over religious matters as head of Islam for Selangor.
He admitted, however, that this was a “crude” way of looking at it.
He added that the Sultan’s decree was very general and that there was still a question of whether or not it contravened any law of the land.
“This broad sweep of no politics [in mosques] is hard to implement,” Ragunath said.
“It’s very difficult to challenge the directive of the sultan and say it’s against the law. Is it against any law and objective of the law [that’s been] passed by the state?”
He cited the Societies Act 1966, University and Colleges Act 1971 and the Legal Profession Act 1976 as the only instances of a gazetted restriction on politics.
