Let the annual conference of judges this year, held after the March 8 “political tsunami”, be really different from the annual conferences of judges in the past two decades – when the judiciary except for a very brief period was smothered by a cloud of denial that it had increasingly lost national and international confidence in its independence, integrity and competence with one judicial crisis after another.

The most infamous Judges’ Conference was the one held in Kuching in March 1996 where the then Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohtar Abdullah shocked Malaysians with the revelation of a 33-page poison-pen letter which made 112 allegations of corruption, abuses of power and misconduct against 12 judges, together with his directive to the police to launch investigations to “ferret out” and “bring to justice” the “conspirators” and “brutish beasts” so as to strike “at the venomous elements who are out to discredit the judiciary and subvert justice in our beloved country”. Read the rest of this entry »