Your article on the Suhakam report on rights of remand prisoners, does not indicate any real earth shattering recommendations. Some of the recommendations are already part of the existing law which police have conveniently decided not to adhere to. This includes the use of the procedures in the Criminal Procedure Code on arrest and investigations.

Others are found in how our courts (including excellent judgments by former judge Syed Ahmad Idid) have interpreted police powers. This includes for example the necessity of police to first inform the relatives of those arrested (in order that they may visit them). In so many cases, police have conveniently not done this, which then prevents relatives from monitoring police abuses like extended remand for investigations when police actually take their time to investigate and thereby penalise remand prisoners in extra-legal jail time.

The police have also abused procedures in the Criminal Procedure Code by arresting people under preventive detention laws other than the Internal Security Act. This allows an inordinate length of period in remand as a type of punishment.

This includes the Dangerous Drugs Act and the Emergency Security Cases Regulation (Escar). Escar was once struck down by the Privy Council as an invalid emergency law. Parliament (with a BN majority) thwarted the judgment by resurrecting Escar as an act of Parliament.

I wonder if the Suhakam report made any finding on the proper use of such laws to side-step ordinary procedures relating to arrest and remand.

It would be certainly welcoming and refreshing if Suhakam had also investigated the relevance of the outdated 1953 rules and the relevance of international instruments on the police powers and treatment of prisoners.

I have not read this Suhakam report, but some of the past reports are relatively weak in indicating the use of international principles of human rights and our accountability to them. All national human rights commissions grew out of a recommendation from the 1993 UN Human Rights Conference in Vienna. It is incumbent on human rights commissions to check human rights abuses against these international standards.