Lawyer for Malaysian Opposition Leader Is Charged With Sedition
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Version 2 of 4. JAKARTA, Indonesia — A lawyer for the Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was charged with sedition on Tuesday, a move that Mr. Anwar denounced as part of a conspiracy to weaken his appeal of a sodomy conviction and orchestrate his return to prison. The lawyer, N. Surendran, who is also a member of Parliament and a vice president of Mr. Anwar’s party, was released on bail. Mr. Surendran, who faces up to three years in prison if convicted, was charged under Malaysia’s Sedition Act in connection with a written statement he issued in April as Mr. Anwar’s legal counsel, shortly after Mr. Anwar’s 2012 acquittal on sodomy charges was unexpectedly overturned by an appellate court. In the statement, Mr. Surendran said that the appellate court gave insufficient consideration to defense claims that the sodomy charges stemmed from a plot by Prime Minister Najib Razak’s governing coalition to sideline the 67-year-old opposition leader. Mr. Anwar had been charged with having anal sex with a male aide; homosexual acts are illegal in Malaysia. Mr. Anwar, once a senior leader of Mr. Najib’s governing United Malays National Organization, was imprisoned from 1999 to 2004 on sodomy and corruption convictions that he also said were politically motivated. He said the charges had been orchestrated by the long-serving prime minister at the time, Mahathir Mohamad, who ousted Mr. Anwar, his onetime protégé, in a power struggle in 1998. “Look at the state of democracy in Malaysia,” Mr. Anwar said Tuesday by telephone from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. “Clearly there are no freedoms, no freedom of speech. Surendran said what he should have said as legal counsel, representing a client.” Malaysia’s sedition law, which dates from the days of British colonial rule, makes it illegal to bring “into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the administration of justice in Malaysia.” In recent days, police reports were filed against Mr. Surendran by a number of people, including politicians from the governing coalition, after Mr. Surendran repeated the conspiracy accusations at a news briefing this month. “This is an act of great injustice, and it’s clearly an attempt to deny Mr. Anwar a fair hearing in his upcoming appeal,” Mr. Surendran said by telephone from Kuala Lumpur. “The action was clearly designed to silence any attempt to raise questions of a political conspiracy involving the prime minister or the government. “The message is we have no right to question a legal decision,” he said. Mr. Surendran said that hundreds of the governing party’s members and supporters across the country had filed police reports against him in recent days. “It’s a standard tactic. First they make political moves, and then law enforcement takes action.” In Malaysia’s general elections in May 2013, Mr. Anwar’s opposition coalition had the strongest showing of any opposition group since the 1960s, denying Mr. Najib’s coalition a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Mr. Anwar claimed that the voting was rigged and that his coalition should have won. Mr. Najib, whose government has repeatedly denied targeting Mr. Anwar, pledged both in 2012 and during last year’s hotly contested election campaign to abolish the Sedition Act. “Anytime there’s a charge of sedition, you can be sure there is a political agenda involved,” Lim Teck Ghee, head of the Center for Policy Initiatives in Kuala Lumpur, said Tuesday. “Najib has said he wants to do away with this rather draconian act, but what seems to be happening is the reverse,” he said. |