COMMENT | The debate over judicial appointments has intensified with a few people, from legal scholars to legal practitioners, recently defending Chief Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat’s call for greater insulation of the judiciary from executive oversight.

They suggest that the prime minister’s power to reject names recommended by the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) is antithetical to judicial independence, and that judges should be appointed based solely on merit, free from political preference.

While such views are often well-intentioned, they run the risk of enabling a new problem - the slow emergence of an unaccountable bench, a judiciary that answers to no one, yet wields the power to reshape public life through constitutional interpretation.

The call to entirely remove the prime minister’s role from judicial appointments would tilt the constitutional balance and, paradoxically, endanger the very accountability that...