KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 20 ― The Attorney-General should authorise the Bar Council to prosecute Perkasa president Datuk Ibrahim Ali for his call to burn Malay-language bibles or risk being seen as lacking impartiality, PKR MP Gooi Hsiao Leong said today.
Gooi also said the Bar Council ― the governing body of Peninsular Malaysia's lawyers ― should apply for a fiat from the government's top prosecutor on its own to allow itself to initiate criminal proceedings against Ibrahim.
The awarding of such a “fiat” is not new or unprecedented, Gooi said, pointing to the AG's previous appointment of private lawyer Tan Sri Shafee Abdullah to prosecute Opposition Leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim on behalf of the government in a criminal case involving a sodomy charge.
“Failure on the AG’s part to positively respond to my call herein to issue a fiat, would confirm the public’s strong suspicions that the AG is not impartial, and is enforcing the law selectively.
“Just as a person who incites others to burn the Quran would clearly be a punishable criminal offence, equally Ibrahim Ali must be brought to court to face the full brunt of the law for inciting others to burn the Bible,” the Alor Setar MP wrote in a statement.
In his statement, Gooi criticised the AG's reasons on why Ibrahim was not charged, claiming that the decision not to prosecute reflected the top government lawyer's alleged failure to carry out his “oath of office to enforce the law without fear or favour”.
Gooi said that it is not for the AG to accept Ibrahim's explanation that he had no intention to commit an offence.
The onus, the lawmaker said, is on Ibrahim to convince the courts that his intentions or actions were excusable in law.
“It is the Court’s duty and not personally up to the AG to decide Ibrahim Ali’s guilt or innocence under the law,” Gooi said.
The PKR MP also dismissed the AG's reasoning that it would not be an offence to defend one's religion as “utterly nonsensical”.
“A person’s right to defend his religion does not give him the right to incite one group of religious faith to cause disharmony, disunity, or ill-will against another group of people of different faiths,” he said, adding that Ibrahim's case could be brought under Section 298A (1) of the Penal Code.
Over the past few weeks, the AG Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail has repeatedly explained the Attorney-General's Chambers (AGC)'s decision not to press charges against Ibrahim.
In a speech last week, he said his prosecutorial discretion has to be exercised with regards to the evidence.
“At the end of the day, even if it is said that it is for the court to decide, the Attorney General still has to decide whether to charge a person. This must be done based on the evidence after a complete investigation,” he said, later saying that even a court would have to decide based on the same facts and factors.
Abdul Gani also acknowledged that a sedition charge would not hinge on an individual's intention, but noted that there was also a court case saying that the alleged seditious action must be viewed in context.
In Ibrahim's case, the Perkasa leader issued the bible-burning call after a police report on the distribution of bibles to students, including Muslim students, in front of a Penang school, he said.
Abdul Gani listed down Ibrahim's own clarification that he had not intended to create religious strife but had wanted to defend the sanctity of Islam, as well as his qualification that his call to burn bibles was directed at the group distributing them to students.
Ibrahim had never called for the burning of “all bibles” which would be seditious, but had pointed to the edition of the bible that allegedly had Malay words with the word “Allah” and Jawi script that could “confuse”, he said.
He also asked if the AG could have said that Ibrahim's statement was seditious if it was clearly “intended to be an appeal to stop the propagation of a religious doctrine or belief among persons professing the religion of Islam as provided under Article 11(4) of the Federal Constitution, and not merely a call to burn Bibles” when read as a whole.
