KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 22 — The Court of Appeal ruling barring the Catholic Church from referring to God as “Allah” in its newspaper has created a precedent for a future ban on non-Muslims from using the Arabic word, a civil liberties lawyer has said.
Syahredzan Johan said that it was “inaccurate” to represent the appellate court decision as being limited only to the Herald, or to non-Muslims in peninsular Malaysia.
“What the Court of Appeal has essentially done is to create a precedent in which the word ‘Allah’ may be banned on the basis that that it causes confusion,” Syahredzan told The Malay Mail Online via email.
“So, in the future, if a government wants to ban the word in the Al-Kitab or in the Sikh holy book, they can use this as precedent and use ‘creating confusion’ as a basis. What is even worse is that the Court of Appeal appeared to decide that the minister does not even have to provide proof of how this confusion will result in threats to public order, that he is able to subjectively decide,” he added.
Tan Sri Joseph Kurup, minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, insisted yesterday that Christians in peninsular Malaysia, as well as in Sabah and Sarawak, can still describe God as “Allah” in their weekly masses, despite the Court of Appeal ruling.
He said that the court decision, which found that allowing Christians to describe God as “Allah” would cause confusion in the Muslim community, was restricted to the Herald.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak also said yesterday that Christians in Sabah and Sarawak would not be affected by the ruling.
The Cabinet has however not provided any basis for their interpretation which contradicts the opinion of the Malaysian Bar and other lawyers.
Ministers have also not directly addressed why the government thought the Herald, which is circulated only among Catholics including in the Borneo states, had been singled out for the ban.
Syahredzan noted that the Herald case was essentially a judicial review of the home minister’s ban on the Catholic Church’s weekly newsletter, the Herald, from using the word “Allah” in its Bahasa Malaysia section.
“So, it is correct to say that the Court of Appeal decision directly affects only the Herald. But what is problematic is the findings of the Court of Appeal and the precedent that it has created,” he said.
The lawyer also pointed out that the appellate court’s finding that the word “Allah” is not integral to the Christian faith set another precedent, and noted that the finding was made without any supporting evidence from the government.
“This finding can again be used as precedent in the future, because the argument will be made that Article 11(1) protection will not be accorded when it comes to the word as it is not ‘profess and practice’ as stated in Article 11(1),” said Syahredzan, referring to Article 11(1) of the Federal Constitution.
Article 11(1) states: “Every person has the right to profess and practice his religion and, subject to Clause (4), to propagate it”.
Several ministers said recently that the 10-point solution issued by Putrajaya in 2011 — which allows the printing, importation and distribution of the Al-Kitab, the Bahasa Malaysia version of the Christian bible, containing the word “Allah” — should stand, despite the appellate court ruling.
Human rights lawyer Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, however, said that such a stand undermined then-Home Minister Tan Sri Syed Hamid Albar’s position that the Herald’s usage of the word “Allah” would cause public disorder.
“It is telling that the current deputy home minister has sought to justify the decision of the Court of Appeal by limiting it to publications by the Herald,” Malik Imtiaz wrote on his blog earlier this week, referring to Datuk Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar.
“And while the deputy home minister may have a point, (that) the case concerns only the permit to publish the Herald and nothing else, the assertion that the word ‘Allah’ can still be used in Malay-language bibles in East Malaysia wholly undermines the position taken by the then-home minister that the use of the word by the Herald would result in public disorder. The Church has after all accepted that the Herald can only be circulated to the Church’s congregation,” added the lawyer.
The Court of Appeal ruling casts doubt over how the judiciary will rule on two similar court cases over the word “Allah”: one is by Sidang Injil Borneo (Borneo Evangelical Church) Sabah, who is suing the Home Ministry for confiscating its Malay-language Christian education publications, which contain the word “Allah”, in 2007.
The other is over the 2008 government seizure of audio CDs, which bear the word “Allah”, that belong to Jill Ireland Lawrence Bill, a Sarawakian Christian.
Both cases have been put on the backburner the past few years pending the disposal of the Catholic Church’s case.
But Annou Xavier, Bill’s lawyer, told The Malay Mail Online recently that the principles in his client’s case differed from the principles in the Herald case.
“Different because (the Herald) case is about a permit issued by Home Ministry where the permit says you can’t use the word in the weekly. In Jill Ireland’s case, it is about her right of education and her right of worship,” he had said.
