Despite court ruling, other ‘Allah’ legal challenges to proceed

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Oct 21, 2013

(MMO) – These three cases involving Jill Ireland, Sabah SIB and the Herald’s publisher have cast a spotlight on the rights of religious minorities in the country, especially Bumiputera Christians.

Amid continuing unease over the effects of an appellate court ruling suggesting Muslim monopoly over “Allah”, a lawyer in another case also related to the use of the Arabic word has sought to put distance between the two instances.

Annou Xavier, the lawyer for Jill Ireland Lawrence Bill, maintained the Sarawak-born Christian’s legal challenge involving compact discs bearing the word “Allah” differed from case in which the Home Ministry banned the use of the word in the Catholic Church’s weekly paper Herald as part of the publication permit.

“The principles in (the Herald) case and the principles in Jill Ireland’s case [are] a little bit different,” Xavier said when contacted by The Malay Mail Online.

“Different because (the Herald) case is about a permit issued by Home Ministry where the permit says you can’t use the word in the weekly. In Jill Ireland’s case, it is about her right of education and her right of worship.

“We will try to distinguish Jill Ireland’s case from the Court of Appeal (ruling),” he said.

Last week, the Court of Appeal’s Justice Datuk Seri Mohamed Apandi Ali said the home minister had acted well within his powers to disallow the Herald from using the word “Allah” in its Bahasa Malaysia section, which caters to the Catholic Church’s Bumiputera Christians.

The court also controversially decided that “Allah” was not integral to the Christian faith and its practice.

“From such finding, we find no reason why the respondent is so adamant to use the name ‘Allah’ in their weekly publication. Such usage, if allowed, will inevitably cause confusion within the community,” the leading judge in a three-man panel had said when reading out from a summary of the judgment.

When asked how the judges’ finding that “Allah” was not integral to Christianity would affect Jill Ireland’s case, Xavier merely said that the judges had “went on a frolic of their own”.

Xavier, who had also represented the Catholic Church in the Herald case, stressed that Jill Ireland’s case will still proceed.

“As far as Jill Ireland case is concerned, we will go on with the case irrespective of decision of the Court of Appeal,” he said, amid concerns that the ruling would not bode well for other court cases on the word “Allah”.

The ruling also casts doubt over how the judiciary will rule on another similar court case brought by Sidang Injil Borneo (Borneo Evangelical Church) Sabah, who is suing the Home Ministry for confiscating its Malay-language Christian education publications, which contain the word “Allah”, in 2007.

Both the SIB Sabah case and Jill Ireland’s case were put on the backburner in recent years pending the disposal of the Catholic Church’s case.