Instead of being showered with gifts and bouquets on its third anniversary this week, Malaysia's Human Rights Commission is getting brickbats from activists who say it needs to do more to assert its independence.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, the commission, known by its Malaysian acronym Suhakam, has been doing a balancing act courting popular appeal on the one hand while trying not to upset the government of Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad on the other.

Suhakam's record came under scrutiny when non-governmental organisations (NGOs) reviewed its performance over the past year at a meeting organised by Era Consumer Malaysia last week in Ipoh, about 160km north-west of Kuala Lumpur.

National expectations were high on Sept 9, 1999 when Parliament gave birth to Suhakam, whose task it is to recommend improvements to Parliament about the state of the nation's human rights conditions.

The commission has received good feedback for some of its positions, including attempts to create more room for itself in an environment where the government frowns on political dissent.

But it has been a source mostly of disappointment for many civil society groups present at the Ipoh meeting.

'Suhakam hurt me'

''I was detained for 51 days. I was stripped naked and blindfolded. But when they took me to see the commission, it was blind and handcuffed too. The only thing the commission asked me was whether my food was okay,'' said N Gobalakrishnan, a member of the opposition party Keadilan who said he had been detained without charge.

''Fifty-one days in detention did not hurt me. It was Suhakam that hurt me,'' he told the meeting of 200 NGO and political party representatives.

But if it is under fire from NGOs, the commission's relevance and the importance of its work have also been belittled by the national Parliament. In June, its speaker rejected an opposition motion to take up Suhakam's 2001 report on the grounds that it lacked urgency to warrant being put on the agenda.

In its 2001 report, carefully written given the sensitivity of its position, the commission itself said that people's right to a fair trial and right to peaceful assembly have been severely curtailed in that previous year.

According to the report, detention without trial under the colonial-era Internal Security Act (ISA) was used by the government to deal with what it claimed were threats to national security.

As a result, the number of detainees under the ISA originally drafted to fight the communist insurgency and which allows indefinite detention without trial increased from 40 at the end of 2000 to 78 in 2001.

''While the government justifies the ISA as a preventive detention law to deal with threats to national security, civil society groups see it as a oppressive law which can, and has been, abused to serve the political interest of the government,'' the report says.

The commission also quoted figures from the Bar Council Legal Aid Centre in Kuala Lumpur, which said that of the 800 people arrested under the ISA during 1998-2000, the majority were not charged.

The majority of those charged for attending an unlawful assembly were either acquitted or discharged, showing ''that those people should not have been arrested in the first place,'' the report said.

Informed visits

Explaining that Suhakam is caught in a difficult position in trying to do its job without preference or favour, one of the human rights commissioners, Prof Chiam Heng Keng, told the meeting: ''We do not dance to the tune of government or NGOs.''

But civil society groups pointed out several areas where the commission has let people down.

Irene Fernandez, president of Tenaganita, an NGO working with migrant workers, said the commission's main weakness lay in its investigative methods when it comes to ISA cases.

Fernandez said that the commission's detention visiting policy, under which officials are informed ahead of a visit, needs to be scrapped. ''When you prior inform, they clear up. You come back making statements that situations are fine. This is disastrous for me. The process of investigation has to be changed. New methods must be brought in.''

Suhakam has also changed the process of how it handles complaints from the public. Commissioners no longer meet complainants personally and now have full-time staff talking to them, activists say. But Chiam says commissioners do not always enough time to meet with the public.

''This has created bureaucracy instead of confidence,'' Fernandez said. ''It is only when you meet affected groups, will you be sensitive [to their problems].''

Students' rights

Student activist Chang Lih Kang questioned the effectiveness of the commission, saying that it had failed to protect student activists who were among the most vulnerable to human rights violations under the Universities and University Collages Act.

This law discourages students from taking part in political activities, and some who do have been dismissed from their universities. Chang says it denies also students of their right of assembly and freedom of speech.

Chang told the conference that a student had once contacted the commission with a complaint but rather than offer to meet the student, it had sought to discuss the matter directly with the university without the student being present.

''Suhakam must stop these bureaucratic process that stops it from meeting people. It must give students a level playing field,'' he said.

In response to questions posed by activists, commissioner Chiam insisted that Suhakam went about solving problems quietly, as it does when handling cases involving student activists and the universities.

''It is best for us not to shout out, otherwise the government and the university will not talk to us. We have to ask silently, so we are not credited sometimes,'' she acknowledged. IPS