(Penang, Sunday): Acting PAS President, Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang and other
PAS leaders had repeatedly assured Malaysians, whether in Terengganu or outside,
Muslims or non-Muslims, before the enactment of the Terengganu
PAS Syariah Criminal Offences (Hudud and Qisas) Bill by
the Terengganu State Assembly last Monday that the Syariah laws and hudud had
long been practised in Saudi Arabia and proved to be effective in maintaining
peace and security.
Hadi said it was only on “rare occasions” that people convicted of offences
are punished under hudud, “may be there would be one or two cases in 10 or
more years”.
Hadi said that there was too much public concentration on
the punitive aspects, such as the chopping of hands and whipping, which had
obscured the “beauty” of the laws, and asserted that “punishment under the
hudud law cannot be meted out on the suspect even if there was a 0.01% of
doubt”.
I confess that I had known very little about the human
rights condition or the justice system
in Saudi Arabia, but when the PAS Terengganu State Government ignored the DAP
email to withdraw the Hudud and Qisas Bill, and proceeded to enact it although
it is against the Malaysian Constitution, violates human rights, discriminates
against women, destroys the 1999 Barisan Alternative Common Manifesto and flouts
the strong and widespread objection of the civil society, I decided to educate
myself on Saudi Arabia following Hadi’s assurances about Saudi Arabia as a model society and
state for Malaysia.
It has been a culture shock to me to read the massive
literature on human rights and the justice system in Saudi Arabia available on the Internet, as there are
tons of materials in cyberspace describing in great detail
its deplorable human rights record and its “justice
system without justice” (title of one Amnesty International report on Saudi
Arabia).
I believe I have read enough about the human rights
condition and the “justice system without justice” in Saudi Arabia to say
that Malaysians who accept or do
not oppose Saudi Arabia as the
model whether for an Islamic state
based on Syariah law or just as a state have lost the right to speak on human
rights or condemn draconian laws like the
Internal Security Act as the Saudi
Arabia justice system is hundred
times more draconian and oppressive than
the ISA.
For what they are advocating is in fact to move Malaysians
from the present half-light of human rights,
justice, freedom and democracy in Malaysia into
the full darkness of the night in Saudi Arabia.
In the year 2000, Amnesty International (AI) launched
an international campaign to improve the status of human rights in Saudi Arabia,
under the slogan “End the secrecy…End the Suffering”, and in the same
year, came out with five country reports, with each report detailing different
patterns of human rights violations.
These five damning indictments of gross human rights
violations in Saudi Arabia issued during the AI campaign in 2000 were:
Saudi Arabia – A secret state of suffering
Saudi Arabia – A justice sytem without justice
Saudi Arabia – Encouraging human rights debate
Saudi Arabia – Execution of Nigerian men and women
Saudi Arabia – Gross human rights abuses against women
These five AI reports in 2000, together with subsequent AI
reports, including Defying World Trends – Saudi Arabia’s extensive use of capital
punishment (June 2001) and Saudi
Arabia – Remains a Fertile Ground for Torture with Impunity (April 2002)
should be compulsory reading for all Malaysian politicians who want to enter
into the debate about democracy, human rights, hudud and syariah laws and an
Islamic State.
My self-education in the past week on the human rights and
the justice system in Saudi Arabia
have raised fundamental questions about
the picture painted by Hadi and the PAS leaders, in particular their assertions
that Saudi Arabia’s syariah laws and hudud had been effective in maintaining peace and security;
that hudud punishments are invoked only on “rare occasions”,
“may be there would be one or two cases in 10 or more years” and that
hudud punishments like chopping of
hands and whipping “cannot be meted out on the suspect even if there was a
0.01% of doubt”.
AI said in a 2000 report that over the past 20 years, it
had documented patterns of systematic human rights violations which clearly
reveals that people who are arrested “find themselves trapped in a criminal
justice system that provides them with no information about their fate, allows
them no prompt contact with their families or a doctor, and offers them no hope
of contacting a lawyer. The system perpetuates a wide range of human rights
violations – arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention, the incarceration of
prisoners of conscience, torture, secret and summary trials, cruel judicial
punishments and executions – which are all facilitated by the state’s policy
of secrecy and the prohibition of the right to express conscientiously held
beliefs. Detainees also find
themselves at the mercy of a system that offers little respect for human dignity
and virtually no hope of redress.”
Are hudud convictions in Saudi Arabia virtually impossible
to secure because they cannot be meted out if there is a 0.01% of doubt and are
hudud punishments few and rare, “one or two cases in 10 or more years”?
The facts points to a grim and gruesome contrary.
In its 2000 report, Amnesty International said it had
recorded 1,163 executions in Saudi Arabia between 1980 and December 1999.
The AI said: “The main reasons why so many people are
executed are the wide scope of the death penalty, the vague laws that are used
to impose it and the defective criminal justice system which allows courts to
impose such sentences with few procedural safeguards. The figures also indicate a rising trend in the use of the
death penalty. The average annual number of executions between 1980 and 1986 was
29. The average between 1987 and December 1999 was 73.”
The Human Rights Watch 2001 Report said that in the first
nine months of 2000, at least 104 Saudis and foreigners had been beheaded,
“exceeding in nine months the total of 103 that Amnesty International recorded
in 1999”.
The US State Department Human Rights Report 2002 on Saudi
Arabia states that the Saudi authorities acknowledged 81 executions during 2001.
Amnesty International recorded 90 judicial amputations in
Saudi Arabia between 1981 and December 1999, including at least five cases of
cross amputation (right hand and left foot), but it said the true number is
probably much higher. Such punitive
surgery are clearly contrary to international codes of medical ethics such as
the UN Principles of Medical Ethics and the World Medical Association’s
Declarations of Geneva (1948) and
Tokyo (1975), a modern equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath.
These grim understated statistics do not reinforce Hadi’s
contention that hudud laws could check crimes because they create the fear of
punishment or that it is very difficult for anyone to be punished under the
hudud laws as
prosecutions required 100 per cent proof against the offenders.
I am prepared to be proved wrong about the deplorable state
of human rights and the “justice system without justice” either by Hadi or
even by the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Malaysia.
By stating that the human rights and justice system in
Saudi Arabia is hundred times worse than that of Malaysia, I am in no way
defending or condoning the gross violations of human rights or abuses in the
justice system in Malaysia.
There must be no let up in the battle to restore justice, freedom, democracy and good governance in Malaysia, but Malaysians must not be led up the garden’s path to support a system or model which is hundred times worse than that currently prevailing in Malaysia.
(14/7/2002)