A Prime Minister Loses His Patience

In 1986, Dr Mahathir Mohamad gave an interview to Time magazine. He was tired of the Executive (read, ‘government’) losing its cases.

“The Judiciary says to us,” he complained, “‘Although you [the Parliament] passed a law with a certain thing in mind, we think that your mind is wrong, and we want to give our interpretation.’“¹Dr Mahathir Mohamad, interview with Time (1986), as quoted in Malaysian Bar, ‘Court vs State: The Battle of 1988’ https://www.malaysianbar.org.my/members_opinions_and_comments/court_vs_state_the_battle_of_1988.html accessed 8 August 2026.

Then came the threat. If the courts kept ruling against him, he said, “we will have to find a way of producing a law that will have to be interpreted according to our wish.”²ibid.

Read that with some care. A Prime Minister was not proposing to appeal a bad decision.

He was not proposing to change a bad law once, properly, through Parliament. He was proposing to keep changing it.

Again. And again.

Until the judges stopped disagreeing with him.

That is not how law is meant to work.

In a functioning democracy, Parliament makes the law.

The courts say what it means.

Malaysia’s top judge in 1986 was Tun Mohamed Salleh Abas. His title was ‘Lord President’ — the old name for the head of the judiciary, before it became “Chief Justice” in 1994.

His job was to hold that line.

Within two years, he would lose it.

The Case Nobody Was Punished For

The opposition leader Lim Kit Siang thought the Time remarks went too far. He asked the courts to punish the Prime Minister for contempt of court — for saying something so disrespectful of the judiciary that it undermined the courts themselves.³Lim Kit Siang v Dato Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamed [1987] 1 MLJ 383 (SC). It is a serious charge, used sparingly by any court worth the name.

The High Court threw the application out. So did the Supreme Court on appeal, presided over by Salleh Abas himself. The remarks reflected “the Executive’s frustration,” the court said, not real contempt. There was “no call to be overly hypersensitive and to overact impetuously.”⁴Lim Kit Siang v Dato Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamed [1987] 1 MLJ 383, 384 (SC).

It was a generous ruling. The court had every excuse to take offence. A Prime Minister had just threatened, in print, to rewrite the law until it agreed with him. The court chose not to take that excuse.

Even history has trouble with this case. A panel report, commissioned twenty years later to set the record straight, gets the court wrong. It credits this ruling to the High Court judge below, not to the Supreme Court that actually gave it.⁵cf Malaysia, Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons to Review the 1988 Judicial Crisis (2008) para 2.6, attributing the Supreme Court’s appellate ruling to the High Court judge below.

If the official inquiry cannot keep its own facts straight, a sixteen-year-old reader is owed no apology for needing them explained twice.

Here is a detail nobody has thought to add up. Three judges sat on that bench: Salleh Abas, Abdul Hamid Omar, and Eusoffe Abdoolcader.

Within nineteen months, Salleh Abas was removed from office.

Abdoolcader was suspended and put on trial.

Abdul Hamid Omar chaired the tribunal that removed Salleh Abas — and then took his job.⁶Office of the Chief Registrar, Federal Court of Malaysia, ‘Former Chief Justice’ https://www.kehakiman.gov.my accessed 8 August 2026 (Abdul Hamid Omar, Lord President, 10 November 1988 – 24 September 1994).

One bench. One case, dismissed mercifully in the Prime Minister’s favour.

Every man on it was swallowed by the crisis that followed anyway — one as its chief victim, one as his replacement.

A Foreigner Gets What the Court Would Later Be Denied

A few months earlier, the same court had decided a smaller case. It is the kind of case that never makes the news, and never should have to.

A foreign correspondent named J P Berthelsen had his employment pass cancelled by the Immigration Department. Nobody told him why beforehand. Nobody gave him a chance to explain himself. The Supreme Court set the cancellation aside.⁷JP Berthelsen v Director General of Immigration, Malaysia & Ors [1987] 1 MLJ 134 (SC).

The principle behind that ruling is old and plain. Lawyers call it natural justice: before the state punishes you, it must tell you the case against you, and let you answer it.

Berthelsen got that chance. The department that tried to take it from him answered to one man. From August 1986, the Minister of Home Affairs was Dr Mahathir Mohamad himself — on top of being Prime Minister.⁸Third Mahathir Cabinet (formed 11 August 1986): Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, 11 August 1986 – 26 October 1990.

Notice the shape of it. A journalist, not even Malaysian, got the hearing the law demanded of the state. Eighteen months later, the country’s most senior judge would be accused, tried and removed. The Panel that later reviewed his case called the process “indecent haste.”⁹Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons to Review the 1988 Judicial Crisis (2008) para 2.1. The right the Supreme Court had rescued for a stranger, it would not get to keep for itself.

One Case

Salleh Abas was later accused, among other things, of favouring the government’s opponents from the bench. Look for the proof, and it thins almost to nothing. The 2008 panel reviewed the whole record. Its finding was blunt: Berthelsen “appears to be the only case in which Tun Salleh participated and found against the government during the relevant period.”¹⁰ibid para 2.4.

One case. A foreign journalist’s work permit. That, on the government’s own later admission, was the pattern the whole crisis was supposedly built on.

It is worth sitting with that for a moment. 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.

Everything that follows in this series happens in the gap between that grievance and that evidence. It is not a small gap.

A Lord President lost his career inside it.

None of this yet explains why a Lord President should end up removed from office.

It does not explain why a Prime Minister should feel he needed him gone.

For that, the story starts where these stories usually do — inside the Prime Minister’s own political party, tearing itself in two over who should lead it.

Next: Chapter 2 — The party splits.

∞§∞

This article is written for a general readership and does not constitute technical or legal advice. Readers with legal questions are encouraged to seek independent legal advice.

The author thanks KN Geetha, TP Vaani, JN Lheela, and Lydia Jaynthi at GK Legal. Our gratitude to Alain Bonnardeaux of Unsplash for the image.

Claude, Anthropic’s AI, smoothed the drafting; Perplexity Pro checked the facts. The argument, the views, and the errors remain the author’s.

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