KUALA LUMPUR, March 2 — The judiciary is in talks with the Malaysian government to set up a court complex just for Kuala Lumpur’s commercial cases to be heard and decided on, Chief Justice of Malaysia Datuk Seri Wan Ahmad Farid Wan Salleh said today.

Wan Ahmad Farid said this is intended to attract investors to Kuala Lumpur, as the capital city would be known for the resolution of commercial disputes in court.

“We are negotiating to take away the commercial divisions of the High Court to another place, a special, dedicated standalone court complex, so that to show the investors that we are very serious in judicial dispute resolution in Kuala Lumpur.

“So we want Kuala Lumpur to be in the world map as to judicial dispute resolution, to be more attractive to the would-be investors,” he told reporters in a press conference after launching the High Court in Kuala Lumpur’s International Commercial and Admiralty Division (ICAD).

He confirmed that the proposed commercial court complex for Kuala Lumpur would be for the entire commercial division at the High Court in Kuala Lumpur, and not just for the new ICAD division.

The High Court in Kuala Lumpur has many divisions and specialised courts, such as appellate and special powers; commercial; civil; criminal; family; and special corruption courts. 

At the High Court in Kuala Lumpur, the number of commercial court cases registered in 2024 was 7,390, and this grew to a whopping 9,671 cases in 2025.

With ICAD launched today, it will specifically handle international commercial cases involving companies registered abroad, as well as admiralty cases which includes shipping and maritime disputes.

Wan Ahmad Farid said there are now 116 active cases that the ICAD will handle, including 54 admiralty cases.

Judiciary works to reduce workload and backlog

Separately, Wan Ahmad Farid confirmed that the judiciary is working towards having more judicial commissioners — who carry out the same duties as High Court judges for two years and can be later confirmed as High Court judges depending on their performance — to cope with the volume of court cases.

“We are trying to ease the workload of judges by appointing more judicial commissioners (JCs) and at the next Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) meeting, we are going to see what are the statistics like. So upon filtering the figures and statistics, we will know how many additional JCs that are needed to be appointed, and JAC will put the recommendation to the Agong for them to be appointed,” he said.

In January, Wan Ahmad Farid said Malaysia has seen increasingly more court cases being registered (with 2.4 million criminal cases and over 480,000 criminal cases as of November 2025) at all court levels.

Based on the JAC’s website’s statistics at the time of writing, Malaysia’s judiciary currently has these vacancies: one Federal Court judge, five Court of Appeal judges, 25 High Court judges (15 in Peninsular Malaysia and 10 in Sabah and Sarawak).

There are now 69 High Court judges, and 48 judicial commissioners already appointed now.

Asked about the judiciary’s efforts in reducing the reported backlog of judgments at the High Court, Wan Ahmad Farid said judges with such pending written judgments have been working on clearing the backlog.

“We are doing fine, Chief Judge of Malaya has been briefing me on a weekly basis that the judges with a lot of backlog of grounds of judgment, they are trying very hard to reduce the number of backlog,” he said.

The judiciary’s practice direction requires judges to write their judgments within eight weeks after an appeal has been filed, but some appeals have reportedly been delayed due to unwritten judgments.