M Kulasegaran, DAP national vice-chairman and Ipoh Barat MP, today urged Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz to refrain from exculpating Ibrahim Ali over the latter's inflammatory rants.
“I applaud Nazri for his leadership in the matter of our accession to the International Criminal Court, so why would he want to spoil the constructive spirit of that initiative with exculpations for a rabble rouser?” asked Kulasegaran (left) who worked behind the scenes with Nazri to smooth Malaysia's membership of the ICC.
“Without Nazri's initiative, Malaysia would not be on course to become a member of the ICCnext month,” he asserted.
Nazri drew immediate flak for the remarks he made over the Christian-bashing rants of Ibrahim Ali, the chief of Malay pressure group Perkasa, which have led to calls that action be taken against the Independent MP for Pasir Mas.
The de facto law minister offered the controversial view that inflammatory statements emanating from the Perkasa leader are now the common coin of the blogosphere; hence targeting Ibrahim for prosecution would necessarily be selective.
Sedition Act flouted with impunity
“A better tack would be for Nazri to say what he feels about Ibrahim's rants rather than seek to excuse them on the spurious grounds that these are now the norm in the blogosphere and therefore it is futile to call incendiary elements to account,” remarked Kulasegaran.
“Perhaps Nazri (right) should lead a move to have the Sedition Act repealed because, according to him, it is no longer enforceable,” he suggested.
“There's not much continuing to have a law in the statute books that cannot be enforced simply because that law is being flouted with impunity,” opined Kulasegaran.
He said he was not being patronising to Nazri by claiming that based on the “constructive spirit” of the minister's initiative in gaining Malaysia's accession to the ICC, Nazri was “not a partisan hack but a minister capable of bipartisan endeavour.”
“It is not time, then, for Nazri to initiate the repeal of a law that has become obsolete and by his own reckoning is not enforceable?” queried Kulasegaran.
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