Saturday June 27, 2009
Defend and respond to criticisms, retired judges told
IPOH: Retired judges whose judgments have been criticised should respond and defend themselves, said Federal Court judge Datuk Gopal Sri Ram.
He said this was because retired judges were no longer bound by the vow of silence.
“The fact that they have not done so must mean only that the criticism is unanswerable or that their intellect has not been offended,” he said in his speech when launching Datuk N.H. Chan’s second edition of his book How to Judge the Judges here yesterday.
In his book, Chan, a retired Court of Appeal judge, discussed the latest Malaysian cases which he considered to be infamous because he believed them to be unjust.
Sri Ram noted that Chan had regularly contributed articles to at least two websites, some of which had been described as “scathing”.
“But none has said that it was undeserved. Criticism is part of the environment in which a judge functions. It is only through criticism that we acquire knowledge.
“Oversensitivity to criticism can only lead to ignorance or worse, intellectual arrogance,” he said, pointing out that even celebrated English judge Lord Denning had been subjected to harsh criticism.
Earlier, Chan said the aim of his book was to explain the law in simple language by referring it to a reported judgment.
“When people are aware that a judge has made a decision which is not according to the law, they would know who the bad judges are in this country,” he said, adding that when people could tell the difference between good and bad judges, they would no longer tolerate a bad judiciary.
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