About 1,700 pages, including witness statements, are ‘missing’ from the trial of migrant worker activist Irene Fernandez, leading to her appeal hearing being postponed to May 12.
Her counsel M Puravalen told Kuala Lumpur High Court judge Mohamad Apandi Ali that the incomplete records have made it difficult for both sides to pursue with the hearing.
“If the notes are missing from the records of appeal, then we cannot proceed as it poses a challenge for us,” he said this morning.
He described it as “grave and frightening” that statements from five key prosecution witness and all 21 defence witnesses are missing from the trial records.
Fernandez was charged with publishing false news in March 1996.
At the conclusion of what was dubbed ‘the longest trial in Malaysian history’, Fernandez was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in 2003 by Kuala Lumpur magistrate Juliana Mohamed.
In 1995, the Tenaganita director had written an exposé of conditions in immigration detention centres, in a memorandum entitled ‘Abuse, Torture and Dehumanised Conditions of Migrant workers in Detention Centres’.
She was arrested and charged under Section 8A(1) of the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984. The maximum penalty is imprisonment is three years’ imprisonment or a fine not exceeding RM20,000, or both.
Fernandez, who filed an appeal against the sentence, is on bail and her passport has been surrendered to the court.
Documents from the trial have since been made available to her lawyers, but Puravalen revealed that the handwritten documents are illegible.
“Many handwritten notes were illegible, hence the typewritten notes that are based on the handwritten notes are equally unreliable,” he told the court.
“We could check with magistrate Juliana but she resigned (from the judicial service) the day (she delivered the) judgment.”
‘One last chance’
Asked to share his views, DPP Shamsul Sulaiman agreed that the respondent cannot proceed with the appeal without all the documents. He asked the judge to make an appropriate decision.
Mohamad Apandi said he would give the magistrate’s court up to May 12 to furnish both parties all the documents.
“I will give the lower court one last chance to give all the documents to both parties. They are answerable to me if they cannot do it,” he said.
“Sometimes things are beyond my control but I will try my level best. I have to be fair to both sides because I know this is not the fault of the appellant or the respondent.”
He also noted that the magistrate’s courts are understaffed, which leads to delays in cases.
The Fernandez case, which went on for 12 years, involved an immense amount of documentation.
“There may have been glitches in transferring all the documents from the old courts (in Jalan Raja) to all 77 new lower and higher courts here at Jalan Duta. Humans, being human, can make mistakes,” he said before setting a new date for the hearing.
Over 50 people turned up in support of Fernandez, including PKR president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, Women's Aid Organisation executive director Ivy Josiah and Fernandez’s sister, Aegile.
