Parti Rakyat Sarawak president Tan Sri Dr James Masing says lawyer Edmund Bon was stating legal facts and should not be charged with sedition. – The Malaysian Insider file pic, September 14, 2014.Putrajaya's pursuit of lawyer Edmund Bon under the Sedition Act will decide the direction Malaysia takes as a nation, says a key Barisan Nasional (BN) leader in Sarawak.
The government has gone on a blitz of investigating and charging a number of politicians and an academic with sedition in the past month and ahead of the country's 51st year as Malaysia.
“I am interested to know the outcome of the investigation and if Bon will be charged,” outspoken Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) president Tan Sri Dr James Masing told The Malaysian Insider in Sarawak state capital city Kuching.
“That will decide where we go as a nation,” said the Sarawak Land Development Minister and a key member of Chief Minister Tan Sri Adenan Satem’s administration, in his reaction to the police investigation on Bon.
He said if the activist-lawyer is charged with sedition for stating legal facts, then (the government) “is a bit way out of line”.
“So I am waiting to see what happens,” he added.
Bon is being investigated under the colonial-era Sedition Act 1948 over an article published in The Malaysian Insider last January where he had said: “Decrees and fatwa cannot be used against non-Muslims because they violate their legal and religious rights.”
He was commenting on a decree by the National Fatwa Council on the use of the word Allah, which the council said was exclusive to Muslims.
“I am not a lawyer but my understanding of fatwa and the jurisdiction of the Shariah Court is exactly just like the opinion made by Bon,” Masing, who has been vocal about Muslim extremism creeping into Sarawak and Putrajaya's stand on the use of the word Allah, added.
PKR deputy state chief See Chee How said Putrajaya's attempt to snare Bon was “stretching the Sedition Act a bit too much”.
“I don't see how speaking the truth can be seditious,” See, a lawyer himself, said.
“There is nothing wrong for a lawyer to give his legal opinion, and Bon was stating the facts.
“All I can think of is that Putrajaya is trying to silence its critics,” said See, a state assemblyman.
“Why should we be cowed?”
See said the misuse of the colonial era law to silence the government's critics would merely add more fuel to the campaign to get rid of it.
“The Act does not belong in our time anymore but to misuse it to silence critics of the government would only spur the campaign to abolish it.”
See accused the government of misusing the Act because “people useful to the government”, a reference to figures like the president of Malay rights group Perkasa, Datuk Ibrahim Ali, had not been hauled up for advocating the burning of Bibles that contained the word Allah.
Bibles – the Malay language Al Kitab and Iban Bup Kudus – used by Christians in Sarawak and Sabah contain the word Allah when referring to God.
Ibrahim's call for the burning of Bibles had angered Christians in the Borneo states
to the point where he was considered a racist and religious extremist and banned by the Sarawak government from entering the state.
- TMI
to the point where he was considered a racist and religious extremist and banned by the Sarawak government from entering the state.
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