The Attorney-General’s Chambers justification in not prosecuting Perkasa chief Ibrahim Ali for his threat to burn Bibles exposes double standard in the organisation, says PKR Youth.

PKR Youth executive council member Melissa Sasidaran asks why the AGC did not consider the “context” in other sedition charges, as it did with Ibrahim.

“For the other charges, the AGC did not consider context or to whom the allegedly seditious speech was addressed to.

“It also repeatedly took the position that intention to disrupt public harmony is irrelevant in a charge under the Sedition Act,” she said in a statement.

“Once more, the AGC is taking a different approach in other cases by taking Ibrahim’s denial at face value without weighing objectively if there are element under Section 504 of the Penal Code,” she said.

Melissa, a lawyer, said that although any use the sedition act is an affront to democracy, it is no excuse to only use the law selectively.

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Nancy Shukri had earlier received brickbats when she said in a parliamentary reply that Ibrahim was not prosecuted because he was just defending the sanctity of Islam.

She later explained that she was just relaying the decision of the AGC.

The AGC confirmed this on Monday when it said that it had not charged Ibrahim (left) for sedition given the context in which he said it.

It argued that he had only referred to allegations that the Malay-language Bible were distributed in a school in Penang and that he had no intention to cause religious disharmony.

It also said that Ibrahim cannot be charged under Section 504 of the Penal Code with breaching peace as it had no intention of disrupting harmony.

In response to the outcry, Ibrahim said he had only directed his statement to Muslim parents who find that their children had received Bibles in school, although this was never proven.

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