Malaysiakini
May 13, 11

The Malaysian Bar Council expressed its outrage today over the strong-arm tactics of police personnel who had threatened a lawyer, impeding her from performing her duties.

“Such blatant police harassment of lawyers is intolerable, and amounts to a reprehensible and inexcusable menace against the physical safety of the lawyer,” Bar president Lim Chee Wee said in a statement today.

He called on the Inspector-General of Police to put an immediate halt to repeated cases of lawyers being harassed and menaced by his personnel and to take stern action against officers guilty of such behaviour.

“Bullying tactics must not go unchecked,” Lim said.

He pointed out that interfering with an accused person’s right to speak to counsel in private is a breach of of section 28A of the Criminal Procedure Code, which provides an accused person the right to legal representation.

Lawyers are also de-facto officers of the court when they are acting for their clients, Lim said, and therefore interfering with their duties is an affront to the courts and the justice system.

All powerful uniform stumped

Last week, Lawyers for Liberty counsel Fadiah Nadwa Fikri said five policemen intruded into her meeting with a client at the Gombak district police headquarters in Selayang.

When she asked them to leave, one officer, standing near a window, pointed at her and said threateningly, “Jangan sampai jadi macam kes SPRM” (Don’t let this be like the MACC case).

The officer’s statement was presumably a reference to political aide Teoh Beng Hock and customs officer Ahmad Sarbani Mohamed who were fopund dead at Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) premises in Shah Alam and Kuala Lumpur.

Fadiah Nadwa said she then challenged the officer. “Do you want to throw me out of the window?” she asked him.

To this the police present kept quiet, but she related that they menacingly continued to disrupt her meeting with her client.