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December 05, 2005
Gadis Lokap II
Read this interesting article by former Inspector General of Police Tun Hanif Omar, who was also a member of the Royal Commission To Enhance The Operation And Management Of The Royal Malaysia Police.
Says Tun Hanif:
One of the commission's findings, at Page 130, is that "intimate search and strip searches [were] held not in strict accordance with prescribed regulations, sometimes due to lack of facilities".... [The Commission] also observed that the police had no proper, standard guidelines on strip and intimate searches consonant with a modern human rights regime.
It was the pious hope of the commissioners vide the report's Recommendation No. 56 that compliance with prescribed laws and human rights would be made one of the three top priorities for the police and that efforts towards this end would be completed by June 2005. [The Sunday Star: The police and their powers of intimate search]
It's pretty obvious that Recommendation No. 56 has yet to be fully implemented.
Read the entire article carefully, and you will find yourself agreeing with him that:
... it is clear that the primary laws under the Criminal Procedure Code are quite bare in its safeguards against the infringements of human rights.
To remedy the situation, he suggests that:
Whilst changing the primary laws – the CPC and the Police Act – can take time as they will have to be passed by Parliament, changing the Lockup Rules and the IGSOs [Inspector General's Standing Orders] merely require the assent of the Minister and the IGP respectively and can be done within days.
Excellent. But I am also troubled.
Because as far as getting Gadis Lokap to do ear squats in the nude is concerned, we can conclude that the police are unlikely to have broken the law.
The new independent commission will probably come to the same conclusion, although we could speculate that it, like Tun Hanif, will call for changes that would better "safeguard against infringements of human rights."
You wanna know what I think?
I think some people have been very quick and very clever.
Why? Look at the terms of reference of the Commission of Inquiry into the Standard Operating Procedure, Approaches or Regulations in the Handling of Body Search in Connection with Arrest and Detention by the Police.
While the the name of the commission suggests a sweeping inquiry, you can see from the terms of reference that its scope is limited to the naked ear squat incident.
If you want the commission to live up to its name, it should have been given the power to investigate the complaints of the four Chinese nationals, who accuse the police of:
... assault, corruption, and sexual harassment while they were in police custody. [The Star: A-G asks cops for more details]
The fact that we don't have a video clip of it does not reduce the severity of the alleged mistreatment.
In fact, if the allegations are true, I would say that the four Chinese nationals suffered worse at the hands of the police than Gadis Lokap.
More importantly, if proven, the police would have broken the law in their "handling" of the four women.
So why didn't the commission's terms of reference include an inquiry into the allegations made by the Chinese nationals?
Anybody want a lollipop?
Posted by aisehman at December 5, 2005 05:50 PM
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