It is hard to understand Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's rationale in his justification for not releasing the five reformasi activists on grounds that his decision to sign the detention order was based on a police report that was submitted to him after their initial 60-day detention period (No freedom for ISA detainees: Pak Lah).

The logic appears to be that while the 60-day police detention was bad in law because it was during this time that the detainees were deprived of legal counsel as constitutionally guaranteed, it was severable and distinct from the home minister's subsequent detention order in which there was no unconstitutionality based on the detainees' deprivation of legal counsel.

This does not address the question of on what other basis the home minister signed the order for continued detention after the unlawful 60-day police detention period.

The home minister and his ministry could not have conducted investigations and surveillance on their own to establish that the reformasi detainees were indeed involved in activities prejudicial to national security. That was and had always been police work and investigations upon which the home minister canvassed his facts to make the decision.

If that police work were bad in law because the facts unravelled from police investigations were a result of the activists being deprived of their constitutional right to legal counsel, then those set of facts illegally and unconstitutionally obtained could not even be admissible in evidence in any court in the land, let alone be relied upon by the minister to continue and justify further detention.

It is an important principle to hold steadfast to that whenever evidence is illegally and unconstitutionally obtained, it should not be dignified by being acted upon, especially in an all-important matter concerning the liberty of a subject and citizen of the country, because to do so would only serve to encourage more illegal gathering of evidence by law enforcers.

A policy that indirectly encourages downline police unlawful investigations should be trenchantly resisted. This is good law, good policy. For ordinary citizenry there must also be good logic.

It is also a fiction bereft of logic that police detention can be severable from the minister's detention order. Whether it was the police detention or the minister's detention, both were based on the same set of facts and investigations by the police conducted by means in contravention of the activists' constitutional right to their lawyers' advice and presence during the 60-day police detention period, and therefore if the earlier police detention could not stand on basis of unconstitutionality, so the subsequent minister's two-year detention (based on the same facts gathered from the unlawful police investigations earlier) cannot and should not be allowed to stand for the same reason.

How is the government to justify its condemnation of PAS's enactment of hudud in Terengganu on grounds that such enactment is an infringement of the constitution when it doesn't itself respect the constitution and continues with the detention of activists based on alleged facts of national security being prejudiced when these alleged facts were a result of police investigations conducted in infringement of the very same constitution (and its provision of right to counsel) that is supposedly held sacred?

This is the part I don't understand and find absolutely inconsistent.