A paper dated April. A signature added in August, by a man who was not a Menteri Besar in April. Can a constitution be finished in two halves?
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In 1988 a young lawyer in Kuala Terengganu put a sticker on his car. It read Tabik Hormat Untuk Lima Orang Hakim. Salute to the five judges... Thirty-seven years later, that lawyer became Chief Justice of Malaysia.
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Every year the judges and lawyers of Malaysia played the lawyers of Singapore at games... In 1988 it was cancelled. ... Men can play cricket together again while the thing they serve is still broken.
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The Bar went to court twice for the judges, and lost twice. The second time, it was the Bar that was punished.
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Fourteen words went out. Three went in. What the courts had held by right, they now held by permission. Parliament gives. Parliament may take away. ... The heading is still there. Underneath it, there is none.
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Three of them apologised. Two refused. That is how the story is usually told. It is wrong in every part.
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Six men were appointed to try the head of the Malaysian judiciary. One of them would get his job.
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The letter that brought down the Malaysian judiciary asked for nothing. It made no demand. It threatened nobody. It sought no remedy from any court. It expressed disappointment, and it expressed a hope. It was also not the Lord President's idea.
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Thirty branches. Nobody had registered them. That was enough to kill the party that had governed Malaysia since independence. Not a coup. Not a scandal. Thirty forms nobody had filed.
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A Prime Minister complained, on the record, of a judiciary that would not do as it was told. Two years of investigation later, the government's own panel could find exactly one ruling to support the complaint — and it favoured a foreigner, not a political enemy. A Lord President lost his career inside that gap.
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