KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 18 — The international community must bear down on Malaysia’s government for its alleged rights violations and actively push for liberty and democracy in the country, Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil Robertson said today.

He admonished the federal government for what he claimed was the “political persecution” of opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim and the heavy-handed treatment of controversial cartoonist Zulkifli Anwar Ulhaque or Zunar for criticising criticizing the Federal Court decision to jail him.

“Has the Malaysian government so clearly lost the plot that even outside observers would recognize that the trial was blatantly political from day one?” Robertson wrote in an op-ed piece run by US broadcaster CNN.

Robertson said Putrajaya was also “wielding the Sedition Act like a hammer” against critics, and described inspector general of police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar as “patrolling the Twittersphere like a shark in open water and tweeting orders to the police to arrest lawyers, activists and politicians.”

He claimed that the trend will only continue after Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced plans last year to add more power to the Sedition Act.

He urged the United Nations, foreign investors and Malaysia’s allies to “wake up and recognise” that Putrajaya is changing for the worse, especially with rising censorship, crackdowns on peaceful assemblies and persecution of ethnic and religious minorities.

“It’s time to support Malaysia’s human rights defenders, and recognize that if the world wants a democratic, rights-respecting Malaysia, it’s going to have to fight for it,” he said.

Last week, the Federal Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s decision to overturn Anwar’s acquittal of a charge of sodomising former aide, Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan, and a five-year jail sentence for the offence.