DAP vice-chairperson M Kulasegaran said that like an idea whose time has come, the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) was irresistible despite the measure's newfangled prevaricators from among the supposedly reform-seeking crowd like newly-minted minister Paul Low.

CNONEhosen by his party to table a Bill seeking to make the IPCMC a legal fait acccompli in the inaugural session of the 13th Parliament, Kulasegaran (left) remarked:

"Various dissenters and opponents of the IPCMC have over the years offered all sorts of reasons for their positions but these have only given cause to brigands among the police force who have thereby been emboldened to inflict their summary punishments.

"This measure was recommended by a royal commission headed by a former chief justice of Malaysia, who had the assistance of a former inspector-general of police, so it is not a half-baked step emerging from the bowels of bureaucracy.

"It is thought-through and considered measure that emerged from 15 months of deliberation by a royal commission, the creation of which was the first reformist measure of the newly-installed Abdullah Ahmad Badawi administration."

Kulasegaran, who is the MP for Ipoh Barat, recalled that then prime minister Abdullah's backtracking on the measure in the teeth of resistance from a cabal of senior police officers was "the beginning of the end of his administration brought on as much by the resistance of entrenched self-interests as by the prime minister's vacillation".

"Now, the IPCMC's proponents find that they have to deal with people like Low whose special pleading on behalf of the utility of measures that have been proven to be useless for dealing with problems they were set up to combat, compose the new group of resisters to the IPCMC," he noted.

Death of a Japanese

NONELow (right), formerly of Transparency International-Malaysia, is the new ministerial inductee in the Najib administration, recruited to monitor transparency in governance but is among those seen to be rapidly morphing into apologists for the status quo and prevaricators of measures they were inclined to favour before, in their previous roles of independent watchdogs.

Kulasegaran described the steadily rising rate of custodial deaths in Malaysia as "a national scandal that constitutes a deep stain on the criminal justice system in this country".

"It is a moral crisis, now having arrived at such unconscionable levels that they have taken the life of a Japanese detainee.

"It's not that a Japanese detainee's life is more precious than a Malaysian's; it is that criminal apathy onf the part of resisters of the IPCMC has allowed for a situation where even a person from a country with diplomatic and economic clout is not exempted from the dehumanisation that is routine in some police lock-ups," fumed the federal legislator.

"Let IPCMC resisters and prevaricators be warned. Pakatan Rakyat is going to move the IPCMC Bill in Parliament and let the people see who is so negligent of our standing as a member of civilised society and who is ashamed enough to want a cessation to this freefall in our standing as a civilised nation."

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