I am honoured as a former Bar President to be invited to speak at this event.
It is an event to pay tribute to the life of the late YM Raja Aziz Addruse for the immense contribution he had made to the Malaysian Bar and the legal profession. He was a person who was held with great affection by countless many at the Bar and outside.
Mr Lim Chee Wee, the current Bar President, has just spoken of Raja Aziz as the outstanding Bar leader he was.
I have been asked to speak of Raja Aziz as the advocate and of his cases.
It has been my privilege to have worked closely with him in several of the important cases that he handled in his career.
I am able to confidently say that with the passing of Raja Aziz, the Bar has lost its gold standard. He was a lawyer who exemplified all that is the best in our profession.
In the long hours that we worked with him, we realised that there was no difference in the public and private persona of the man. He practised and spoke what he believed in private.
In the forefront was his passionate belief in the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary. Yet, above all, he believed in the human rights of the individual. He believed human rights to be indivisible from constitutionalism.
He saw a public role for the lawyer to defend the constitutional rights of the individual and to represent those who are being unfairly treated. For him, the practice of law was not to be a mere commercial enterprise.
In adopting such a stance and as one of the Bar’s senior advocates, he became a role model for the entire Malaysian Bar and established forever the ethos that the Bar should never forget its primary role of upholding the cause of justice without fear or favour.
He was not a person who was swayed by the popular opinion of the day or to take the easy route of agreeability and conformity. In doing so, he sacrificed the enormous opportunities for personal advancement that would have come his way if he was a little more agreeable and a little less critical of those in authority.
Principles like the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary were to him not mere clichés or fancy words to be uttered at the appropriate time and to be forgotten when it becomes inconvenient. Raja Aziz believed in these values. He was acutely aware from the Tunku’s time that Malaysia was a developing democracy and that a proper balance had to be struck between executive authority and individual rights. He saw the Malaysian Constitution as providing for this equilibrium and that the role of the Judiciary was to maintain this balance.
By his cases he strove valiantly to argue for this principle anxious that the judiciary should not be seen by the public to be a mere extension of government.
In mid–1985 he led the Bar team in the sedition case against Dato’ Param Cumaraswamy, the then–Vice–President of the Bar, arguing that the offence of sedition was a relic of British colonialism and did not sit well with the guarantees of liberty and free speech conferred by the modern Malaysian Constitution. Raja Aziz argued convincingly that the term “seditious tendency” could not be applied elastically to cover every criticism of government that comes close to home. The acquittal of Dato’ Param was applauded domestically and internationally as a vindication of free speech in Malaysia.
In late 1987 he led the Bar team in the habeas corpus cases arising from the infamous Operasi Lalang, which saw the most extensive use of the Internal Security Act 1960 (“ISA”) ever in the history of that legislation. He contended that preventive detention under the ISA on the mere say–so of the police was an unjustified deprivation of liberty. He advocated for the safeguards of an objective test enunciated by the Atkin dissent in Liverside v Anderson.
Barely six months later, in March 1988, he led the legal team to fight the unjustified suspension and dismissal of Tun Salleh Abas as Lord President.
It was common knowledge at the Bar that he was outraged by the action taken against Tun Salleh, and saw it as the most serious threat yet to the independence of the Malaysian judiciary.
He believed, as Lord Devlin did, that the judiciary of a country does not belong to any government but is an institution that belongs to the nation, and characterised the action against Tun Salleh and later, the five Supreme Court Judges, as a clear assault on the judiciary.
The Tun Salleh case saw Raja Aziz in his finest hour. Under trying circumstances, he displayed his outstanding skills as an advocate of calmness, clear judgment and clear articulation.
On the first morning, he calmly informed the Tribunal sitting in Parliament House that Tun Salleh does not have confidence in its composition and will not be participating in the proceedings. The legal team led by Raja Aziz then walked out before a stunned Tribunal. Raja Aziz thought it was only polite that the Tribunal be informed personally by the lawyers, in lieu of Tun Salleh, of his non–participation and the reasons for it.
In the same case, when the late Justice Ajaib Singh was taking three days to hear the application for leave to issue an order of prohibition against the Tribunal which was then proceeding rapidly in Parliament House, Raja Aziz declined the intimation he received that another Judge be considered for the application, saying that that would not be proper. It was the measure of the man that he placed propriety and ethical conduct in the forefront of all his cases.
As anticipated, leave was refused in that case.
Then, on that fateful day on July 2, 1988, on a Saturday at 12:50 pm, he rose before the Supreme Court to apply for a stay of the Tribunal’s proceedings with characteristic understatement: “As Your Lordships know there is a Tribunal sitting in Parliament House etc etc”.
He obtained the Order but it had dire consequences for the Judges who gave it. It was to be the last sitting for two of the Supreme Court Judges – the late Tan Sri Wan Sulaiman and Datuk George Seah – who never returned to the Bench. They were suspended two days later and eventually dismissed after a Second Tribunal was established.
The law reports are replete with the cases conducted by Raja Aziz, but I know that it were these public interest cases that most endeared to him.
No matter how controversial the case or the tensions it generated, his style and manner of advocacy never changed. It was a calm and respectful presentation of the case to court.
He eschewed recitation of voluminous case law but chose instead to rely on logic and reason in the presentation of his cases. In this he was eminently successful.
But these successes were not always there with the constitutional challenges he brought to court. It is a statistical fact that most constitutional challenges failed before the Malaysian courts. But he was ever the optimist. I recollect vividly his oft stated response to co–counsel delivered in his inimitable style: “It does not matter. It is important that these things be brought up and argued time and again so that they know these things do matter.”
His devotion to law and legal practice remained to the end, in fact down to his last illness.
In 2009 he took up the brief for Chin Peng, the former Malayan Communist Party leader, on his right to return to Malaya as his homeland. Raja Aziz saw it as a pure legal question devoid of the political rhetoric and posturings that accompanied the case. As he saw it, the case turned solely on the interpretation of the treaty between the Malaysian Government and the defunct Communist Party.
In his last months he was leading the legal team in the Kelantan Royalty case. I have it on good authority from his devoted junior on that brief, Rashid Ismail, that he was monitoring the case from Singapore where he was undergoing treatment, and had wished earnestly to return to his feet to argue the case personally.
Alas it was not to be. He passed away gently into the night on 12 July 2011.
In the end the debt that the Malaysian Bar owes to Raja Aziz is one that possibly can never be repaid. It is fitting therefore that we, as Members of the Bar, are dedicating this auditorium in his name.
As for the nation, as it has been said in so many quarters at the Bar, he was the best Chief Justice that Malaysia never had.
Thank you.
Cyrus Das
Former President
Malaysian Bar
29 Oct 2011