PDRM, Please Stop Embarrassing Us in the International Arena

I am incensed to read about the humiliation and indignity imposed on the 30 women arrested at a high-end night club in Penang. It is shameful that a high-ranking police officer, Penang Police Chief Ayob Yaakob could come up with such moronic excuse that these women’s forehead and chest were marked to distinguish them from other female patrons.

Is humiliating a person, especially a woman, part of the Standard Operating Procedure of the Polis Diraja Malaysia (PDRM)? If that is so, then the Malaysian Federal Government has just thumbed her nose at the Convention of Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) that had been ratified in 1995 and to which Malaysia is a signatory.

The police have also violated the basic rights of these people to do whatever and be wherever they want within the rights enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

PDRM, please stop embarrassing us in the international arena.

The news article titled “Malaysia police slammed for cattle-branding women,” dated 4 June 2011, did not mention if the eight Malaysian men arrested together with the women were also “X-ed” on their forehead or chest. Were the masochistic police being gender selective in carrying out their perverted artistic tendency?

Did the police make any effort to determine if these are trafficked women who were not in the club of their own free will?

I worry for my country when people are detained on the grounds of allegedly wrecking somebody’s marriage. I doubt that Malaysian taxpayers intended for their tax contributions to be used to fund such thing. If that is so, then I suggest the Rakyat demand a refund.

HAJJAH HASLINAH YACOB