©New
Straits Times (Used by permission)
by Sulok Tawie
• Bar Council: Report them to ACA
• Stop it now, corrupt court staff warned
KUCHING: Two retired judges were suspected to be corrupt, Chief Justice Tan Sri
Zaki Azmi said yesterday.
"God helped me because when I came (into the judiciary), they were gone. No, I didn't dismiss them, they retired," he said at a convention on "Integrity, the Catalyst for Sustainable Development" here.
He said he knew the two judges personally.
On the judges still serving the judiciary, he said there were "one or two" who
were not doing their work.
"We are going to take the necessary action against them because as I have said,
'You leave and don't stay'."
Zaki said those who are hardworking will be rewarded.
He also wanted the judges to write shorter and simpler judgments to reduce the
backlog of cases.
"One judge at the Commercial Court Division wrote 500 judgments within two
years. How was it that this judge could, but the others could not?"
Zaki spoke at length on corruption and how to improve integrity and efficiency.
He said the judiciary was an extremely important branch of the government
because the public looked at it as the final bastion.
"If they fail in the executive, the ministries and Parliament, they will come to
the court.
"The court must be there to defend the individuals, but if the court itself is
corrupt, or inefficient, how could the people rely on the court?"
Zaki said the way to beat corruption was to have a good, efficient and fast
delivery system.
Citing the issuance of passports as an example, he said the weeks it took to
process applications made it tempting for those in a hurry to offer bribes.
Now it takes only two hours or "one fine morning" for a person to get his
passport.
"There is no need for any corruption to take place. There is no money to be made
by a person issuing the passport. So, efficiency is the answer."
On how he improved efficiency in the court administration, Zaki said after he
was appointed president of the Court of Appeal last year, the first thing he did
was visit the registry.
"The registry was in a mess with 13 clerks looking after 13 piles of records of
appeals.
"If you want a record of appeal, it takes time because you have to go to the
clerk and the clerk has to go through the bundles of documents.
"With the total support of the Court of Appeal staff, they managed to reorganise
the records of appeals. So now, the records of appeals at the Court of Appeals
are retrievable within two or three minutes, not two or three hours or two or
three days.
"With that, any correspondences received by the Court of Appeal are immediately
attended to and should be replied within 24 hours of receiving them because the
files are retrieved immediately."
He said the move stopped corruption because there was no longer a need to bribe
the clerk to look for the file.
Zaki had also introduced a simpler procedure by getting the lawyers to fill a
form when requesting for files, instead of writing lengthy letters.
When the forms reached him, Zaki said it would only take him two minutes to read
them and reach a decision on the request.
Zaki said he was proud of his staff for this success at the Court of Appeal.
The chief justice said to ensure efficiency, immediate punishment must be meted
out against errant staff.
"(Once) when I was in court, presiding over a case, I turned my back and no one
was there, and they (court orderlies) were chatting outside the room.
"The first thing I did afterwards was to call the registrar to issue a
show–cause letter to them," he said.
"The show–cause letter had the desired effects because two days later, all the
orderlies of the Court of Appeal behaved themselves."
Bar Council: Report them to ACA
KUALA LUMPUR: Bar Council chairman Datuk Ambiga Sreenivasan said the judiciary
should lodge a report with the Anti–Corruption Agency against the two retired
judges for alleged graft.
"The matter must be referred to the ACA if there is
sufficient proof," she said.
In the alternative, she said the the ACA could take notice of news reports to
begin a probe against the judges.
She said this following a disclosure by Chief Justice Tan Sri Zaki Azmi that two
retired judges were suspected to be involved in corrupt practice.
Ambiga said Zaki's comments on corruption among court staff was cause for
concern.
Stop it now, corrupt court staff warned
KUCHING: Chief Justice Tan Sri Zaki Azmi has first–hand experience of having to
face corruption problems in the court.
"What I am telling you is not fiction but based on my own experience in private
practice," he said at an integrity convention here.
Recalling an incident in 1987, Zaki said he was "blacklisted" when he complained
to the chief registrar of two missing files belonging to his clients.
"It took me six months to be nice, to bribe each and every individual to get
back into their good books before our files were being attended to.
"That was my personal experience, and I am telling this to
all the clerks and all the registries to stop this nonsense and I know this is
happening, even as late as last week... a lawyer came to see me."
He added that the clerk asked the lawyer to come the next day to collect the
file after saying "tapi jangan lupa, ya", signalling him to come with cash.