A spokesman for the foreign ministry told FMT it provided feedback to the special rapporteurs, including Mary Lawlor, on the plight of Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani on March 28.

“The ministry has been actively engaged with the home ministry and police to obtain information on and coordinate response to the allegations addressed by the UN special rapporteurs,” said the spokesman.

The ministry said the government needed to verify and investigate the case, carry out inter-agency coordination, and go through legal vetting before it could submit the feedback.

Earlier, Lawlor had questioned the government’s seriousness in looking into the allegations of harassment and death threats faced by Zafar.

Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, said the government had not responded to a letter issued by a group of rapporteurs on Zafar’s plight last December.

Zafar heads a human rights organisation for Rohingya in Malaysia. He has lived in fear since April 2020 after a social media post claimed that he had demanded Malaysian citizenship for Rohingya refugees.

He, his family and his community have faced various threats, and in one incident, the tyres of his wife’s car were slashed.

Zafar, who has barely left his home, has applied to be resettled in another country but has not been successful.