SO it would seem Malaysians can look forward to having yet another piece of legislation in their lives in the brand new year of 2012. This time around, the Barisan Nasional (BN) government has promised it will introduce a Race Relations Bill, to be tabled in Parliament in March. The Race Relations Bill, according to [...]

ON 4 Nov 2011, Penang became the second state in Malaysia, after Selangor, to enact a Freedom of Information (FOI) law. Neither the Penang nor Selangor FOI laws are perfect and both Pakatan Rakyat (PR)-led state governments have already been criticised for not doing better. That’s no different from the public criticisms against the Barisan [...]

IF there is one word that best explains and describes the virulent reaction towards Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan, that word, for me, would be fear. That’s right. Fear. In fact, it would seem from the continuing attacks against the Bersih 2.0 chairperson that this fear is such that she should be detained without trial under the [...]

IT is perhaps destiny that Maria Chin Abdullah ended up being one of the steering committee members for Bersih 2.0, the civil society movement calling for free and fair elections in Malaysia. One of her earliest memories is of independent Malaya’s first general election in 1959 when she was just three. Maria remembers being with [...]

IF we were to believe everything the politicians are saying about hudud, we would come to three conclusions. One, that implementing the punishments prescribed under hudud is divine law that no Muslim can question, and hence is inevitable. Two, that hudud cannot be implemented in Malaysia because of the Federal Constitution and our multi-cultural composition. [...]

PREMESH Chandran laughs when asked if he ever imagined Malaysiakini would become what it is today: the award-winning and leading online media in Malaysia that reaches over 300,000 readers per day in English, Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil. “It grew to be something much bigger than what we expected it to be,” the news portal’s [...]