LETTER | Civil society strongly protests the prime minister’s decision to keep the Council of Eminent Persons (CEP) 100-day report secret simply by saying it is the government’s business.

He has also announced that the Official Secrets Act 1972 (OSA) will stay despite the Pakatan Harapan coalition’s promised revision prior to GE14.

This is in total contradiction to the new government’s commitment to total transparency during the exposés of the Najib Abdul Razak administration just after the May elections.

Refusal to be complicit

NGOs like Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram) that submitted their reports to the Institutional Reforms Committee (IRC) certainly want their submissions to be made public so that the public knows that we are not complicit in the new government’s reneging on their GE14 promises.

Since the May elections, many of our human rights demands have not been met and these include not just the OSA but also detention-without-trial laws, the Sedition Act 1948, child marriages, harassment of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer (LGBTQ) community and the violations of indigenous peoples’ rights.

If the Harapan government does not make the CEP report public, the people may think that the government acted on our recommendations. Thus, I would like to suggest that the Harapan government releases the IRC report since it was submitted separately to the CEP.

CEP’s reputation at stake

The old BN government used to say that the OSA was needed for national security. Now, the new Harapan government says that submissions to the CEP are “sensitive” and that some businesses may suffer.

Really? Does it justify PKR vice-president Rafizi Ramli’s charges under the OSA then since he wasn’t sensitive enough to the health of the corporation he was exposing? After the cows and condos scandal he raised to deserve the charges under the OSA, he might well say, “What a load of bullocks!”

The CEP needs to be reminded that they will be held culpable in Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s recent decisions, which are not just contradictory to the Harapan manifesto but look like the repeat of Mahathir 1.0.

These include the announcement that sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional will be privatised for bumiputera interests and the new national car project Proton 2.0.

Presumably, the prime minister was advised by his Council of Eminent Persons on these decisions. If not, how are we to know when the CEP report is kept secret? I am afraid they will have to live with their tarnished reputation.

Harapan reneging on more promises

This is what was promised to Malaysians in the coalition’s Buku Harapan by Harapan leader Zaid Ibrahim:

“A promise that the Official Secrets Act 1972 in its current form will be repealed will tell Malaysians that corrupt leaders can no longer hide behind draconian legislation. If this act is repealed, our ministers, top civil servants and police chiefs in future will no longer be so filthy rich to steal as they like. It will tell the people that those in the government will not be able to classify documents as official secrets at whim. With this act of revocation, those who have stolen government property will find themselves facing the attention of the world…”

If I quoted all the statements condemning the OSA by former dissidents who now sit in the new government, they would run into reams.

I still remember the rousing speeches against the OSA by all these former “democrats” since the seventies. These are recorded in a publication by eco-activist Gurmit Singh KS during the eighties titled: “No to Secrecy: The campaign against 1986's amendments to the OSA”.

Even more recently on Aug 17, 2017, DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang told a forum that “the Pakatan Harapan coalition will repeal the Official Secrets Act (OSA) and replace it with and a new Freedom of Information Act if it comes into power at the next elections…we are committed to work towards the repeal of the OSA and fight for its inclusion in the Pakatan Harapan manifesto to show its commitment to transparency in line with the spirit of the ‘New Malaysia’”.

The infringement of the rule of law by the OSA was best summed up by Param Cumaraswamy, then president of the Malaysian Bar in 1986:

“With the definition of official secret so wide, coupled with the one-year minimum sentence and the power of the courts curtailed, there is no doubt that the OSA infringes the concept of the rule of law. It confers wide discretionary powers on public officers without adequate protection against abuse. The powers of our courts, which are traditionally the guardians of our freedoms, will be curtailed. The right to free speech and expression guaranteed under our Constitution will be unduly restricted…”

KUA KIA SOONG is Suaram adviser.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.