Rethinking Judicial Appointments in Malaysian Superior Courts: Constitutional Reforms

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-352-8_3How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Judicial Appointments Commission; Judicial Independence; Superior Courts

Abstract

Judicial independence is significant in any justice system because the role of the judiciary is to provide a meaningful system of checks and balances between the executive and the legislature in line with the doctrine of separation of powers. Past researchers had shown that the enactment of the Judicial Appointments Commission Act (JACA) in 2009 did not introduce any true reforms in the Malaysian judicial appointments system. However, no previous scholars had proposed any comprehensive reforms to address these deficiencies in Malaysian laws. The objective of this paper is to address the weaknesses of the post-JACA laws governing the judicial appointment system and to propose relevant reforms to safeguard and uphold judicial independence in the Malaysian superior courts. The objective was achieved by using qualitative methods based on document analysis. The findings of the research showed that the constitutional role and powers of the Prime Minister must be curtailed and reformed to limit the involvement of the executive. In addition, the composition of the Malaysian Judicial Appointments Commission should be increased to include other relevant stakeholders. This requires amending the Federal Constitution, the Judicial Appointments Commission Act 2009, and all other consequential laws.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jenita Kanapathy
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/01/10
TI  - Rethinking Judicial Appointments in Malaysian Superior Courts: Constitutional Reforms
BT  - Proceedings of the 12th UUM International Legal Conference 2023 (UUMILC 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 15
EP  - 31
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-352-8_3
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-352-8_3
ID  - Kanapathy2024
ER  -