The announcement came not with a bang but with a whimper. It was as if the government knew that appointing former attorney-general Abu Talib Othman was not going to stanch the hole that oozed credibility out of the Malaysian Human Rights Commission (Suhakam). Hence the tardiness in announcing the appointment.

An epigone was being brought out of genteel retirement, dusted up with Brut, and pressed into service.

Abu Talib inspires about as much confidence that he will creatively test the parameters of the human rights question in Malaysia as that obscure state CID chief, leading an internal police inquiry, would discover the identity of the assailant who gave Anwar Ibrahim a black eye while he was in custody in late 1998.

Once former chairperson Musa Hitam declined to continue what had already become a lame duck Suhakam chairmanship, the authorities were stuck for a replacement.

It was a measure of the depletion in the ranks of the distinguished and the credibly equidistant (from the government and opposition) in Malaysia that the authorities could only offer someone of Abu Talib's standing to replace Musa.

It takes an effort to remember that there was a time when things were different.

Recall that the panel that inquired into the Bank Bumiputra property investment scandal in the mid-1980's had the services of former auditor-general Ahmad Nordin and lawyer Chooi Mun Sou, blue chips in the national bourse of public reputations.

Their chastisement for a stand they took in the course of the inquiry was ominous for future independent panels.

Expectations confirmed

Since then we have had panels, sifting matters as grave as a sitting Lord President's conduct and as insidious as racial streaming.

Their findings have enjoyed about as much credence as our weather reports.

Not one of the half dozen new Suhakam appointees has a background in human rights issues. Not that this ought be an indispensable pre-requisite, but choosing at least one commissioner with such credentials would have been an earnest of the government's desire to promote human rights.

As it stands, this second edition of Suhakam confirms sceptics' expectations that the government was only out to foist a fiction on the body politic. Now it is not even bothered to sustain its pretensions.

J Terence Netto is a journalist of nearly 30 years' experience consisting of spells spent in the mainstream papers interspersed with bouts of freelancing. All that time he found that the main attraction in journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.