Cops using obsolete legal provision to stop gathering?

By admin-s On Oct 7, 2014

It is unthinkable that two years down the road police are still quoting from the Police Act when commenting on peaceful gatherings.

Hazlan Zakaria, The Ant Daily

It was no surprise that Universiti Malaya law lecturer Azmi Sharom was given the boot when trying to attend a talk he was invited to by a student organisation at UKM last week.

What was surprising though was that a repealed provision of law was still seemingly being quoted as a reason to limit the freedom of public assembly for the students who had gathered to hear him at an impromptu meet-up after he was ejected from the institution of higher learning.

Despite claims of working to improve academic freedom and lift restrictions on Malaysian universities, the government has shown again and again that it reserves the use of education institutions of higher learning for its own propaganda but refuses to allow contending viewpoint to be expressed therein by academicians, activists and opposition politicians.

Azmi joined a long list of others who had been denied access to interaction with university students for not subscribing to the government approved mental curriculum.

Indeed even a liberal and forward thinking member of the ruling BN coalition who was a federal minister had also been given the same treatment when an event he was invited to was cancelled by one university for reasons as nebulous as the usual orders from above spiel.

The use of government controlled venues, agencies and institutions to further the agenda of the ruling BN coalition has long been a tradition for the party in power.

But more puzzling was the reason quoted by a law enforcement officer when stopping the impromptu gathering outside campus grounds after the earlier planned event inside the university was ordered to be cancelled and roadblocks mounted all over the grounds to stop Azmi and the media from attending.

According to the report by Malay Mail Online, a police officer on duty said that “it was an offence for more than three people to gather in a public space without prior approval from the authorities”.

This was the reason quoted by the police to stop the gathering, which seem to be with emphasis on prior approval from authorities.

That specific wording of a gathering being made up of more than three people was the exact one stated in Section 27 of the Police Act giving police the power to issue permit for gatherings, though that specific provision was repealed when the Peaceful Assembly Act 2012 (PAA) was passed by Parliament and came into force.

However it would seem that law enforcement personnel are still not up to speed and quoting from an obsolete Act. In PAA there seem to be no reference to a gathering is composed of three people or more.

This brings to question how effective our laws are going to be if even those responsible for enforcing it are quoting from the wrong law and probably not trained on the new provisions.