Umno lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah’s remarks against Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim after the Federal Court upheld the opposition leader's five-year jail term for sodomy have been described as unprofessional. – The Malaysian Insider pic, February 13, 2015.
It is unprecedented for a deputy public prosecutor to attack an accused person after a court has delivered its verdict, said former Bar Council president Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan.
She was referring to Umno lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah who had allegedly made disparaging remarks against Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim after the Federal Court upheld the opposition leader's five-year jail term for sodomy last Tuesday.
Ambiga said she was surprised by Shafee's conduct because no Attorney-General or DPP would make such statements after a court had made a ruling.
"It was not done in good faith and it is improper because Anwar could not defend himself," she told The Malaysian Insider on the sidelines of a forum in Petaling Jaya last night.
Ambiga especially noted that Shafee, who was ad hoc DPP, had said in a statement that Anwar had raised the defence of alibi but he abandoned it completely when it was demonstrated to be false by closed-circuit television footage shown in the court during trial.
Shafee had said that Anwar also refused to swear on the Quran about the sodomy incident and but that his accuser, Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan, swore on the Holy Book about the details of the case, both in Malaysia and in Mecca.
"This is not proper because he (Shafee) had brought in extraneous factors," Ambiga said.
She said Shafee, who is in the Asean Human Rights Commission, had violated human rights when he attacked Anwar, who was convicted and sentenced by the court.
On Monday, Shafee issued a 20-paragraph statement to the media, criticising the opposition leader for giving a statement from the dock, saying that unlike Saiful, he was not willing to be cross-examined.
"This was his right under the law, but he used it to also attack the prosecution, the judges and his former colleagues in the government.
"He also undermined the country's reputation," Shafee had said, adding that Anwar had also wrecked and forever changed Saiful's life.
He said that Anwar's lawyers had intensely cross-examined Saiful during trial and yet, Anwar had given a statement from the dock when he was asked to enter his defence.
Shafee also reportedly gave an exclusive interview to Umno-owned newspaper New Straits Times and made scurrilous attacks against Anwar and had also rationalised the Federal Court judgment.
Anwar was found guilty of sodomising Saiful in a condominium unit at Bukit Damansara, Kuala Lumpur, on June 26, 2008. He failed to overturn his conviction and sentence at the Federal Court on Tuesday.
Ambiga also said that anyone was free to criticise the judgment, taking a shot at the Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar who had warned those who questioned the Federal Court's decision to uphold Anwar’s sodomy conviction and five-year jail term.
The police chief had singled out two opposition politicians and a cartoonist in his tweets and ordered that they be investigated over their posts in social media that criticised Anwar’s conviction.
"You must not allow for such intimidation," Ambiga said.
- TMI
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