Two good columns

One was in the Star on Sunday, about censorship. Written by Dzof Azmi, he talks about censorship, self-censorship, its impact on the entertainment industry and in journalism:

I consider self-censorship to be potentially detrimental to the work we produce. We want to say something, but we stop ourselves and keep quiet. It cuts the flow of information, and people have to guess at what you mean…

However, the stakes in popular entertainment are lower than what journalists have to face in real life. For us, it’s additional hours in the editing room; for them, it’s sometimes time in jail.

For more, click here.

The other column is by Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, human rights lawyer and activist. He writes on judicial reform, countering Mukhriz Mahathir’s claim that judicial reform is unimportant.

What a shocking thing for Mukhriz to say…

Malik writes:

Matters of judicial competence and integrity impact across the board; they are neither race nor political-party specific. Bad or skewed decisions hurt the wider legal profession and the nation as a whole as much as the litigants involved. One of the biggest difficulties practicing law at the present is the lack of certainty in the law, in part for there being a slew of decisions that have been adjudged without due regard to principle or precedent. In becoming precedents themselves, these decisions have undermined the foundations of not only the legal system but also the system of commerce that it supports. Commerce being wholly dependent on the certainty that only an effectively functioning legal system can provide, the current state of affairs is anathema.

It is for this reason that when entering contracts pertaining to Malaysia, many a commercial party now take pains to stipulate that the law of the contract is not Malaysian law and that dispute resolution is to take place outside the country. That is a cause for great concern, one that we have ignored for far too long to our own detriment. A weak system of justice does no favours for the country in which it exists; it is a sure path to failure for driving investment away, much as we are currently experiencing.

For more, click here, or for Malik’s blog, click here.

Malik also is part of the Project Malaysia team, an excellent resource for the discerning Malaysian.