Uthayakumar's appeal finally fixed for Jan 15

Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) de facto leader P Uthayakumar will finally have his appeal over his sedition conviction heard on Jan 15 at the Kuala Lumpur High Court.

The appeal will be heard before Justice Azman Hussain.

This follows the Sessions Court had submitted its written grounds on the conviction dated Nov 22, and Uthayakumar’s lawyer M Manoharan had submitted 130 grounds of appeal or errors to the decision in seven volumes comprising of 2,224 pages.

He said the date was decided by the KL High Court during case management recently.

Manoharan (right) said the grounds prepared by the Sessions judge was only received on Nov 25, five months after the court decision, and only after five case management sittings.

“We would like to express our appreciation to the Chief Judge of Malaya (Zulkefli Ahmad Makinuddin) for responding to our request, and assuring that the written grounds would be ready by Nov 22 after we had written in earlier,” he told Malaysiakini.

Ideally, as commented by Chief Justice Ariffin Zakaria recently, a judge or judicial officer should have their written grounds ready within eight weeks or two months after an appeal has been filed.

Uthayakumar was convicted and sentenced to two years and six months jail by the Sessions Court on June 5, this year for making seditious statements in 2007, after the court found that his defence failed to raise a reasonable doubt.

He was convicted of publishing seditious material in a letter written between Nov 15 and Dec 8, 2007, to then-British prime minister Gordon Brown, in which he alleged state-sponsored social ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Indian poor in Malaysia. The letter was posted on the now-defunct Police Watch website.

Uthayakumar has chosen to serve jail while waiting for the appeal.

'Political comments not seditious'

Manoharan also said among the main grounds of appeal was that political comments cannot amount to sedition.

"What Uthayakumar states in the letter is within the realm of political comments as under Section 3(2) of the Sedition Act, that notwithstanding anything in the subsection (1), pointing out errors or defects in any government or constitution as by law established, does not constitute sedition," he asserted.

Manoharan also pointed out that Uthayakumar had already served detention under the Internal Security Act where he was held for one year and six months, with other Hindraf leaders. (Manoharan himself was one of them).

Hence, this sedition conviction amounts to duplicity of punishment, said the lawyer.

In addition to this, Manoharan said there was not a single police report lodged against Uthayakumar for the letter, so how could the prosecution say it was seditious?

This, the lawyer pointed out, was unlike Karpal Singh's case where he allegedly uttered seditious remarks against the Perak ruler during the constitutional crisis, where many police reports were lodged.

"In Uthayakumar's case there is no police report. So how can the authorities classify what he had wrote as sedition?"

Manoharan added that the Kuala Lumpur High Court had also ordered during the case management that the prison authorities refer Uthayakumar to a neurosurgeon.

However this has yet to be done.

"Uthayakumar suffers from back pain and also diabetes complications and requires medical attention,"  he revealed.

Manoharan said as he informed the court that Uthayakumar could be classified as a political prisoner, the court has agreed to hold him in isolation.

"The deputy registrar will write that Uthayakumar be placed in the prison's safety division or in its hospital division," he said.