Lawyers for Liberty adviser N Surendran said it was likely that hundreds of innocent people were languishing in jails, “desperately awaiting justice”.
He said the royal pardon granted by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong to Anwar Ibrahim over his sodomy conviction was recognition that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the conviction and jailing of Anwar.
“This raises the disturbing question as to how many other innocent persons are languishing in jail due to miscarriages of justice,” he said in a statement.
Anwar’s predicament received widespread coverage due to his status as a former deputy prime minister and high profile politician. However, Surendran said ordinary convicts, who had been wrongfully convicted and jailed, had to suffer in silence.
“Unlike Anwar, they simply do not have the resources or battery of lawyers to re-open their case or even keep their case in the public eye.
“Therefore, it is imperative that a permanent commission be established by the new PH government to look into suspected cases of miscarriage of justice, which have resulted in the jailing of innocent persons.”
Otherwise, Surendran said, it would be “next to impossible” to revisit the cases of unjustly jailed persons who had exhausted their judicial appeals.
The existing power of the Federal Court under Rule 137 to review its own decisions “to prevent injustice” was of little use to wrongly convicted persons because Rule 137 imposed a very high threshold test, and the court almost never exercised this power in criminal cases, he said.
He added that Anwar himself had repeatedly filed reviews to quash his final conviction under Rule 137, but failed each time.
Surendran said other commonwealth countries had established mechanisms to review suspected miscarriages of justice, giving the UK as an example.
The UK’s Criminal Cases Review Commission is a statutory body set up in 1995 to look into suspected cases of miscarriage of justice and, where appropriate, refer the cases back to the courts to be re-opened.
“The government must learn the lessons of the notorious Anwar sodomy cases, which brought shame to the country and disrepute to the judiciary. It is a great evil to leave an innocent man suffering in prison with no possible remedy.
“There must be an extra-judicial recourse for innocent persons wrongly imprisoned, whom the legal system has failed.
“We urge the new government, which consists of political parties that have made justice a central pillar of their political message, to move quickly to set up a Commission on Complaints of Miscarriage of Justice.”