COMMENT Now that former inspector-general of police Abdul Rahim Noor has made his skepticism about human rights obvious in his keynote address to the Perkasa general meeting last week, we can retrospectively understand aspects of his conduct when he was the country’s top cop.

One would have thought Rahim, following the loss of his job and having endured the humiliation of jail for assaulting former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in the infamous ‘black eye’ incident in 1998, would go gently into a retirement where golf would not be the only diversion.

Certainly, a sustained bout of community service would have helped to assuage society’s bruised sensitivities: nothing obtains a disgraced former luminary redemption in the public eye better than diligent and long service to communitarian projects...