A Malaysian appeals court sentenced Anwar Ibrahim, the country's opposition leader, on Friday to five years in prison on charges of sodomy, a conviction that critics described as an attempt to block the ascendancy of the opposition at a time when the governing party's popularity is waning.
Mr. Anwar, 66, was due to register for a local election next week, and a victory could have put him in charge of the country's richest state, Selangor, which is under opposition control. Although Mr. Anwar is appealing the court decision, and he was released on bail Friday, the conviction bars him from office.
"You have got what you wanted," Mr. Anwar shouted in court, according to Malaysiakini, an online news service.
Anal sex, or "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" as described in the criminal code, is punishable by 20 years in prison in Malaysia.
In overturning a 2012 ruling that had acquitted Mr. Anwar, the appeals court said Friday that the lower court had mistakenly ruled that DNA evidence had been contaminated.
The complainant in the case, Mohamed Saiful Bukhari Azlan, was a former campaign worker for Mr. Anwar who filed the case in 2008.
Mr. Anwar, a former deputy prime minister, was expelled from the governing party 16 years ago and has been locked in a personalized power struggle with his former political party.
He was first accused of sodomy in 1999 in a separate case and served six years in prison. That conviction was overturned in 2004, but the courts upheld charges that he had abused his power as a government official to cover up the allegations.
Unlike in the first case, when the Internet was still nascent, critics of the governing coalition known as Barisan Nasional, or BN, vented their anger at the decision on social media Friday.
"After more than 15 years, BN uses the same old tactic," said Hannah Yeoh, a member of Parliament for the opposition Democratic Action Party. "Shameful. Pathetic. Disgusting."
"Malaysians have thought they had come out of an era of circus politics," read another comment online by Lee Ee May, a management consultant. "Today's sentencing proved that we are still very much at the pinnacle of it."
Mr. Anwar has periodically led large street demonstrations against the government since leaving the governing party, and opposition leaders called for a protest at a stadium near Kuala Lumpur on Friday.
Malaysia's inspector-general of police, Khalid Abu Bakar, warned that unauthorized street demonstrations were illegal and urged "all parties to be calm about the decision."
The governing party, led by Prime Minister Najib Razak, has used paternalistic and mildly authoritarian laws to lead the country since independence from Britain in 1957. The print media and broadcasters are closely monitored by the government, and the right to peaceful protest is circumscribed. Opposition forces, which came close to defeating the governing party in elections last year, say there are many irregularities in the election process.
Michael Vatikiotis, the director for Asia of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a group that promotes conflict resolution, said Friday's decision was part of a "serious challenge" for democracy in Southeast Asia where "courts are used to override popular sovereignty and preserve the power status quo."
"We see this in Thailand, in Malaysia and also in Indonesia, where corruption charges are flung in all directions to undermine politicians," he said. "Eventually there will be a popular backlash against the lack of judicial credibility."
The government issued a statement after the verdict on Friday saying the case was "between two individuals and is a matter for the courts, not the government."
It said, "Malaysia has an independent judiciary, and the judges will have reached their verdict only after considering all the evidence in a balanced and objective manner."
| Reply via web post | Reply to sender | Reply to group | Start a New Topic | Messages in this topic (1) |
to Subscribe via email :
batavia-news-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
----------------------------------------
VISIT Batavia News Blog
http://batavia-news-networks.blogspot.com/
----------------------------
You could be Earning Instant Cash Deposits
in the Next 30 Minutes
No harm to try - Please Click
http://tinyurl.com/bimagroup
--------------
No comments:
Post a Comment