COMMENT A royal commission of inquiry (RCI) occurs but rarely. It is formed when public concern and pressure on an issue arrive at a pitch of intensity that an RCI has to be empowered as placation.

This makes the findings and recommendations of the RCI hugely important for the resolution of the issue that gave rise to it in the first place.

An RCI entails a lot of work and not a little cost.

It is a kind of safety valve that a democracy avails itself when partisan passions rise to a level of agitation that non-partisan public figures have to summoned for the task of inquiry and recommendation.

It is meant to be a panacea for a problem that has become fraught and explosive; mishandled, however, it gains only a temporary reprieve.   

Our country has had three RCIs in 10 years - the one in 2003 on the management of the police force, the second in 2008 on the VK Lingam videotape, and the third on the illegals in Sabah in 2013.

Three in 10 years is a lot of RCIs and the fact that the first two dealt with divisions of the criminal justice system is indicative enough of a malaise affecting both, otherwise there would not have been an inquiry into their state.

We know what happened to the recommendations of the RCI on the police force. A threatened insurgency by senior officers against the most significant recommendation - creation of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) - succeeded in stalling the whole raft of recommendations.

Where was the Sedition Act when its use was most needed!?

Charges under the Act that could have been framed against the ringleaders and that would have taken care of the threatened insurgency.

Had that happened, a start could have been made against an array of problems that plagued the force before and after the RCI was empowered, like rising crime rates and dubious shootings of criminal suspects and deaths in custody.

Today, the recommendations of the RCI, which was formed in December 2003 and produced its report in March 2015, are mothballed, a fate that befell the second RCI which sought to inquire into the Lingam videotape.

Consequence of social media rise

The RCI was empowered in January 2008 as a direct consequence of the rise in importance of social media.

Through video sharing medium, YouTube, a tape purporting to show a senior lawyer in a phone conversation with a supposed judicial figure was disseminated.

The content of the conversation concerned an attempt at judge-fixing and case-fixing.

It was sensational and chalked up a great many hits from the time it first made its appearance in August, 2007.

The videotape was like a lighted match on a powder keg - the lawyer in the tape had been in an earlier controversy stemming from a photograph, also circulated on the net, showing him on holiday in New Zealand with the top judge in the country, so that his appearance in the video made the ensuing clamor for an official investigation well-nigh unstoppable.

      

The government of then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi could not stave off public pressure for an inquiry.

An RCI was formed and began its work in January 2008. A slew of judicial and political personalities, including former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, were called to give evidence.  

The RCI worked with dispatch and came out with its recommendations in late March 2008, within two months of completing its inquiry.

Observers speculated that the results of the 12th general election in early March 2008 where the ruling BN was denied its traditional supermajority in Parliament must have emboldened the RCI members to not only speed up their findings but also recommend that Mahathir be charged for unlawful infringements.

But like the recommendations of the RCI on the management of the police force, the ones on the Lingam videotape were swept into the archives where they now reside in august obscurity.

Sure, the recommendations would have encouraged lawyer Zaid Ibrahim, inducted as the de facto law minister in Abdullah’s post-electoral tsunami cabinet, to push for and obtain a measure of restoration of their reputations of impeached former apex court judges, Salleh Abbas and George Seah, who were impugned in 1988, in the time of the Malaysian judiciary’s darkest chapter.

Other than this salutary by-product, the recommendations of the RCI on the Lingam tape were neutered by executive inaction.

A similar fate?

It will be big surprise if the recommendation of the third RCI the country has had in 10 years – on illegals in Sabah - avoids a similar fate.

Its report proposed the setting up of a committee to manage the problem of the issuance of identity cards (ICs) to people who had come into Sabah illegally over the past several decades.

In an astonishing conclusion, the RCI report attributed the issuance to venal rather than political motives.

This is about as credible an assertion as that which holds personal misconduct, not politics, to be responsible for the preferment of sodomy charges against opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

For an RCI report to be credible, it would have to have the ring of truth to it. That’s the first test it would have to pass.

Even when it passes that test of truth, it would then have to run a gauntlet of political hurdles before being implemented, especially if its recommendations hold dangerous implications for ‘protected’ political figures.

Though the RCI report on Sabah illegals does not appear to have passed the truth-test, it is headed for constipation because the sole recommendation of the setting up of a committee to manage the problem is a recipe for miring it in bureaucracy.

The fate of the third RCI in Malaysia in 10 years on a tumultuous issue has reinforced the view that setting one up is an expensive exercise in constipation.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.

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