No abstract

This paper is inspired by an interest to understand the roles and contributions of human rights advocacy groups to Malaysia and society. It aims to assess their effectiveness in advocating human rights, and the limitations that they face by referring the SUARAM as the case study. SUARAM has over the past two decades become one of the visible non-state actors in the country in its role to achieve better human rights protection. This study is concerned with how SUARAM has evolved, with special focus on its work in the area of civil and political rights. Despite changes in the political landscape of the country and the increase of civil actions and public awareness on the work of civil society groups, this paper argues that they can claim little achievements for the past years of human rights activism due to the rigid government policy, the non-human rights friendly legislation, and also its own internal organizational weaknesses. One significant aspect is the close link of human rights advocacy groups with the political parties that can lead to problems of credibility and transparency.

Malaysia’s 14th general election in 2018 saw the fall of the Barisan Nasional (BN) regime after ruling the country for more than six decades. Prior to the election, Malaysia faced challenges ranging from the absence of state legitimacy, fragile institutions to corruption scandals, leaving little room to have robust discourse on legislative reforms. Promise 16 of the Pakatan Harapan (PH) election manifesto prior to the election, pledges to restore the dignity of Parliament to institutionalize the select committee system in Parliament and the Senate to enable them to function effectively. Whilst there is limited post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) in Malaysia for now, the various reforms in the phase of democratic transition to the administration of PH is a positive sign of the possibility for Malaysia to move into better law-making procedures. This paper examines the work that is currently being undertaken in the Parliament of Malaysia to assess whether the current parliamentary reforms can pave the way for the PLS mechanism to be put in place.

The right to vote in free and fair elections has long been a disputed issue in Malaysia. Elections are marred not only by partisan constituency delineation and polling irregularities, which misconstrue the voters' choice, but also by election campaigns that are tainted by bribery, abuse of government machinery, and biased behavior by the supposedly independent public institutions. In response to these recurring problems, an electoral reform movement gradually emerged in the new millennium that came to be known as the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections or Bersih, meaning, “clean” in Malay.