Malaysia scored high in last year's international judiciary corruption perception survey because respondents felt petty corruption in the country was low, said Transparency International (TI).

The Berlin-based corruption watchdog said that the survey's methodology could have led respondents to ignore corruption in the higher courts and added that the survey was not meant as a ranking exercise.

TI's Global Corruption Report carried a survey involving some 60,000 respondents from 62 countries last year.

The results, which were released last week in its 2007 report, revealed that Malaysian judiciary was perceived to be the 9th least corrupted. The results have surprised TI Malaysia and the Bar Council, leading to calls for an explanation on the results.

In a response to those calls, Global Corruption Report editor Dieter Zinnbauer defended its methodology but said TI understood why misinterpretations had arisen.

"I fully share your astonishment about the barometer results on Malaysia, which need to be sufficiently contextualized and interpreted in extremely careful manner so as not to send a wrong message and let the Malaysian judiciary off the hook," said Zinbauer in a letter to TI chairperson Ramon Navaratnam yesterday.

Zinnbauer described the survey's methodology as "robust" and "adheres to scientific standards".

Important consequences

He revealed that a total of 1,250 Malaysians were interviewed in the "urban mainland area" in the country.

The fieldwork was carried out by Gallup International on TI's behalf between July 24 and Aug 22, 2006, he said. The survey's method was face-to-face interviews.

Zinbauer said TI could not reveal the breakdown of respondents by ethnicity or socio-economic group as the survey was meant to be a global survey.

"This has important consequences. [The survey results] call for an indepth local study on the experience and perception of the judiciary that takes account of domestic specificities and different stakeholder groups, some of which may have significantly different experience with corruption that is not directly visible in a single national average," he said.

Zinnbauer also said the survey was not a ranking exercise: "[The survey was] on the perception of corruption, not direct experience. This is an extremely subjective matter."

"People in different countries have very different expectations, interpretations of corruption and may use very different reference points for what constitutes a corruption-free environment."

"Thus concluding that judicial corruption is worse in country X than in Y is not a valid inference. This is not a ranking exercise and interpretations to that effect in the media are most regrettable," he said.

Possible misinterpretations

On the relatively high ranking, Zinbauer felt that Malaysian respondents might have focused on petty corruption, and left out interference by political and economic powers.

"So it is imaginable that courts that work reasonably well in adjudicating lower level civil and criminal cases would receive a rather benign rating, although political manipulation and intervention by powerful economic actors in important commercial and political cases is rife," he said.

Zinbauer said despite possible misinterpretations, TI's credibility "obliges us to not leave out research findings that have been produced with a robust methodology, even when those numbers turn out to be prone to misinterpretations."

"Let me emphasise again that I absolutely sympathise with your surprise about the reported numbers and the inconvenient challenge to deal with a media fallout that does not sufficiently contextualise the numbers and risks to undermine the tremendous and important momentum for judicial reform that you have built in Malaysia," he said.

The survey, dubbed the Global Corruption Barometer, is a public opinion survey that assesses the general public's perceptions and experience of corruption.

This year's focus was perception of corruption within the judiciary.