The Malaysian state of impunity
By Jacqueline Ann Surin, The Nut Graph
TWO things alarmed me about the arrest of Adrian Yeo, who is Selangor exco Elizabeth Wong’s aide, in Miri on 16 April 2011 after the Sarawak elections. One was the number of police officers who publicly assaulted him before he was taken away. The other was how none of the five or more police officers who dragged Yeo away could tell him exactly what he was being arrested for.
Despite repeated demands, even pleas, of “Apa kesalahan saya?”, no police officer at the counting centre for the Senadin seat can be heard explaining to Yeo why he was being arrested.
According to the Bar Council’s Red Book: Know Your Rights, an arrest is unlawful if you are not informed of the reason. And yet this did not stop the Miri police officers who hauled Yeo away that night. They unlawfully dragged and carried and pushed and incarcerated Yeo even though the whole incident was in full public view and was clearly being recorded. And they did this because frankly, the Miri police knew they could get away with it.
Impunity
From blog and Facebook discussions, it would seem that Yeo’s only crime was to ask for a recount of the ballots in Senadin, which Parti Keadilan Rakyat lost by a wafer-thin 58 votes. No matter what the event was that triggered his arrest, what should be startling to Malaysians is the impunity by which those in power – in this instance, the police – act against citizens or public interest.
What is even more disturbing is that the police’s impunity is not limited to just arresting someone who represents the opposition.
In an 11 March 2011 letter, Bukit Aman told the Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) that the 2010 police statistics on sexual crimes and crimes against children had been classified as “confidential” and hence, could not be released.
No official reason was given for how or why these statistics, which are funded by tax payers, had suddenly become “confidential”.
WAO executive director Ivy Josiah explains in a phone interview that before this, for example in 2010, the women’s rights group was able to get hold of the same statistics for the previous year. “This would suggest that the process of declaring something ‘confidential’ or ‘secret’ is arbitrary,” she notes.
