Communications and Multimedia Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said he was not the minister responsible for trying to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Icerd).

He said ratifying Icerd was contained in the Pakatan Harapan manifesto and was also mentioned by the then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad at the United Nations (UN) general assembly in 2018.

“I was not the minister responsible for Icerd,” Saifuddin (above) said on his official Twitter account.

He was commenting on the claim by DAP organising secretary Anthony Loke who said the idea to ratify Icerd and the Rome Statute was Saifuddin’s idea and not that of the DAP.

The then Harapan government backtracked from both after a backlash from conservatives.

On Nov 23, 2018, Saifuddin, who was the foreign minister at the time, was quoted as saying that the government’s decision not to ratify Icerd was decided unanimously in a cabinet meeting.

“Both the decision on ratification and later to withdraw from the Rome Statute, were made in the cabinet meeting and I was the minister who was responsible for it,” he said.

On April 5, 2019, Mahathir announced that Malaysia was to withdraw from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) due to confusion caused by politics and not because it could harm Malaysia.

Mahathir said Malaysia, which signed the instrument of accession to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court on March 4, 2019, and deposited the instrument to the United Nations Secretary-General on the same day, could withdraw the instrument before June.

The UN secretary-general, acting in his capacity as depositary, said Malaysia’s withdrawal from the instrument of accession was effective on April 29.

- Bernama