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Thursday, May 5, 2016

Dropping Rooney Rebit appeal only done for votes


COMMENT The government has intervened and disallowed the appeal of the National Registration Department (NRD) in a case of religious conversion in Sarawak. MIC president Dr S Subramaniam has applauded the move, saying that it serves as a precedent for future interfaith cases.
No, Subramaniam, you are dreaming. It will not serve as a precedent unless a similar case arises in the future in the heat of another election in a state where Christians are not a tiny minority.
The intervention by Sarawak Chief Minister Adenan Satem and Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak was clearly influenced by the fact that Rooney Rebit - the person at the centre of the case - was a Muslim convert who wished to return to the fold of Christianity.
The church made it very clear that the Christian community would punish the Barisan Nasional if Rooney’s conversion was not accepted by the NRD. That’s why it’s not a precedent but a political strategy.
Let the law take its course
Some 20 years ago, I was maligned for defending Lina Joy’s right to convert to Christianity. I said that when it came to religious conversion the government, including the religious departments, must not get involved.
We should let the law take its course. No one in Putrajaya should get worked up just because a few Muslims want to convert, either to Christianity or Hinduism.
If the government had been true to the Federal Constitution and allowed for religious freedom in the true sense of the phrase - and if we accept that there will always be a few “wayward” Muslims and non-Muslims who will change their religion - then we would not have the situation, as we now do, of religion becoming a political football or, worse, dividing the country.
The short-sightedness of the BN government and the sheer folly of thinking that faith can be regulated by law have come home to roost.
If Lina Joy had been allowed to register herself as a Christian, which she had tried to do for more than 15 years, and if the NRD had not insisted on her getting “approval” from the state Religious Department before being allowed to make the registration change, the Rooney case would not have happened and would not have become an election issue of great importance.
A smart government would have directed the attorney-general at the time to give the appropriate advice to the NRD without creating much fuss.
I am surprised that Christians and the churches have not also demanded, during this Sarawak election, that the decision on Catholic journal The Herald case be reviewed by the government.
After all, the reasoning made by Court of Appeal was so flawed and bereft of common sense that it does not deserve a place in our law reports. Furthermore, the Federal Court judges seemed uninterested in commenting on the decision, perhaps adopting the philosophy of letting sleeping dogs lie.
But this will haunt the country in the near future, just as Lina Joy’s case has influenced the BN’s fate in Sarawak, where many voters are Christian.
The rationale of The Herald case seems to me to be this: you are free to practise the Christian faith but the words “in peace and harmony” in Article 3(1) of the constitution, as explained by attorney-general Mohamed Apandi Ali, mean that if the majority decides that your practice does in some way “affect” Islam or the sanctity of Islam (as perceived by the Muslims) and can give rise to civil disorder because the majority is unhappy with that particular practice, then your freedom is limited to that extent.
This is Apandi’s construction of the words “in peace and harmony” which, to some, is perhaps his greatest contribution to jurisprudence in the country.
I, on the other hand, believe that such reasoning is uncalled for. The expression that others are free to practise their religions “in peace and harmony” means just that - other believers, besides Muslims, are free to practise their faiths with no qualification, supervision, limitation or circumscription determined in any way by how Muslims feel about the practice.
Otherwise, there is no meaning to religious freedom in the country. Of course, this issue will not affect an election in peninsular Malaysia just yet, but it will be a big issue in Sabah and Sarawak in the near future. The prime minister and the respective chief minister will have to “intervene” again.
It would have been a lot easier if we had allowed the law to take its course, which means that we need jurists who are smart and also able to give plain words their ordinary meanings. We need jurists who are not afraid to be true to the law and who are prepared to make whatever decisions they deem necessary under the constitution.

Those who are short-sighted think that promoting “pro-Muslim” jurists who share their views makes sense or will somehow “help Islam”, but little do they realise that this kind of intervention is like a lie - if you lie once, it must be followed by another lie to cover up the first lie.
Political intervention in cases of religious freedom will suffer the same fate, over and over again, and the sanctity of Islam - the very thing that these interventionists profess to defend - will be mocked because politics always take precedence.

ZAID IBRAHIM, a former federal minister in charge of law, is a lawyer by profession. This piece first appeared in his blog. -Mkini

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