Zahid shooting from the hip again

It is highly unlikely that the British government will extradite Clare Rewcastle-Brown.

COMMENT

The adage “to leave no stone unturned” means to be thorough or to try every means possible to achieve something, according to the Oxford Dictionary. One must commend Home Minister Zahid Hamidi for doing just that in trying to silence Clare Rewcastle-Brown of Sarawak Report fame.

The government’s attempts to block Clare’s stories about 1MDB are elevating her and her website to an almost heroic and mythic status amongst the virtual community. There have been numerous offers to set up crowd funding to help Clare should she need money to sue her detractors. Netizens who previously weren’t too bothered to seek out Sarawak Report are certainly curious now. And, as all seasoned busybody netizens will tell you, “When there is a will there is a way” – to get around the barriers.

Weeks since the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) dropped its bombshell assertion of big money from sovereign development fund 1MDB ending up in the personal bank accounts of the Prime Minister, Umno gunslingers have been charging to the rescue like the Union Cavalry galloping in to save the besieged settlers against the savages. Only in this saga, the settler is but one. Much like in a good Western flick, there has been a lot of loud bugling and furious firing of rifles into the air.

Galloping horses are always nice to watch. They make a thunderous sound with their pounding hooves and they churn up such a cloud of dust that it’s hard to see. Presumably, it is all good because the settler is safer when the savages can’t tell where he is amid the din of firing and the choking dust. But alas the savage Clare is nowhere within rifle range.

Ill intent

The Home Minister has said that if “ill intent” against the government can be proven, then charges can be brought against Clare and then there would be a possibility of the British government extraditing her to be tried under Malaysian law.

We know that in the time since the public learnt of the multi-agency panel being tasked to investigate 1MDB, the establishment’s focus has shifted perceptively away from 1MDB itself towards the people talking and writing about 1MDB. As those recently put on the Immigration Department’s watch list will attest, it’s getting dicier by the day to be critical of 1MDB. 1MDB has quickly become a sacred cow of sorts and out of bounds if one has nothing good to say.

So we’ll discuss instead the prospects for extraditing Clare Rewcastle-Brown to Malaysia.

It isn’t enough that Malaysia has an extradition treaty with the UK. The British and the Australians are a lot alike in that they both need to recognise that the crime purportedly committed has a corresponding equivalent in their own statute books. They will also have to determine if the person extradited is likely to receive a fair trial. A hearing is usually held to determine if all of this is complied with and if the consequent punishment in the destination country might be in breach of the Human Rights Convention or against their laws.

Murder is recognised as a crime everywhere, so there’s no problem if Clare is being charged with a murder committed in Malaysia, but so not if she were to hang. This is exactly the current difficulty in extraditing Sirul Azhar from Australia. The Aussies will not repatriate him because they do not support the capital punishment he would face upon his return.

Even Raja Petra Kamarudin, who is Malaysian, was not extradited because there is no corresponding law in the UK that criminalises what he did.

Clare is certainly no murderer, unless we count reputations as her victims. But that would be nearer to libel or defamation, for which there are civil remedies in the British system. In any case, her words need to be untrue for the label to stick, as truth is the ultimate defence against libel. Simply put, if what she writes about is found to be true, then there’s no case.

What would be even harder for the Malaysian government to prove is “ill intent”. It can be argued that it might be beneficial for the public to learn of a possible wrongdoing or have it exposed if it happens to be the truth. In practice, the interpretation of similar laws may be quite different in the UK. Let’s just call that differing political considerations.

If it is a case for civil litigation, then one party would have to show that the other is lying. Thus far, Wall Street Journal has shown the same penchant to stand by its story and it would hardly be fair to gun for Clare alone just because she may be weaker, when WSJ, which has a wider reach and greater impact, goes unchallenged.

It is unlikely that this would an extraditable offence as the criminal element isn’t too obvious and would be hard to prove. But this is putting the cart before the horse because the Malaysian authorities are saying she cooked it up or is lying through her teeth. Yet the four recent detentions surrounding the scandal suggest that even the MACC must believe there were improprieties. The key figure has neither denied nor confirmed allegation of the monies transiting his accounts. The task force has also not declared publicly any of its findings, which would be the only thing to quell public speculation.

It looks like the Home Minister was shooting from the hip again just for a loud noise even if the Brits are unlikely to play ball on this as it’s not their mess to clean.