Najib sees no harm meeting with judges

The prime minister says he attended the conference at the invitation of the outgoing chief justice.

PUTRAJAYA: Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak said he saw no harm in attending a meeting with the country’s top judges as it did not breach the principle of separation of powers.

Some quarters have argued that his presence at the Council of Judges’ Conference was tantamount to tampering with the judiciary.

Several lawyers including former judges have said Najib’s visit to the Palace of Justice alongside the country’s top judiciary members, including the outgoing Chief Justice Zaki Azmi, could be perceived negatively.

Najib said his visit was at the invitation of Zaki.

“I had to think hard before I accepted the invitation,” he said in his speech before the judges.
“I only agreed to visit after the chief justice invited me and assured me that there was no problem,” he added.

Zaki said the meeting with Najib was merely to prove that the allocation of RM130 million in public funding to modernise the courts was well spent.

Najib agreed, saying that his visit to the Palace of Justice was to observe the changes made in the judiciary under Zaki’s helm.

Initially, the top agenda of the conference was to discuss the delays in submitting written judgments.
However, it was changed at the last minute to include a trip to the Palace of Justice to meet and take photo-shots with Najib.

No such meeting before?

However, critics, including former Bar Council president, K Ragunath, was quoted by an online news portal as saying that the meeting was the first of its kind in the country’s history.

But incoming Chief Justice Arifin Zakaria, who was also present, told reporters that there had been two such meetings in the past where a prime minister had attended to have a dialogue with the judges.

Meanwhile, Najib praised the courts for speedily reducing the backlog of cases by up to 90% over the past two years under Zaki.

The new policy had supposedly resulted in three-quarters of the courtrooms now only dealing with cases filed in 2010 and 2011.

Najib claimed that a World Bank report released on Monday praised the judiciary for reducing the the backlog, saying it had achieved results “rarely reached”.