Bar president Karen Cheah said the EGM’s full details would be released after the Hari Raya period, with a notice to be issued to members by tomorrow.
“We hope to see the attendance of members of the Bar across the nation, including our past presidents, to express their thoughts on this issue and to vote on motions that would be significant to the future of our judiciary.
“Let there be no repeat of attempts to undermine it, as was done during one of its darkest hours in 1988,” she said in a statement today.
This follows a petition by six former Bar presidents to urge the current office bearers to hold a “walk for justice” in a bid to voice out against claims of “intimidation” of the judiciary.
Mah Weng Kwai, Kuthubul Zaman Bukhari, Yeo Yang Poh, Ambiga Sreenevasan, Lim Chee Wee and Steven Thiru had said “it is time for the Bar to once again rise and fearlessly defend the institution of the judiciary”.
Cheah maintained that the Bar Council had been working on discussing the matter even before the petition arose, adding that the council held an emergency meeting last Friday over the issue.
She said it was at that meeting that the Bar Council decided to call for an EGM on an urgent basis.
She added that the Bar Council also issued a statement on April 25 on preserving the judiciary’s independence and maintaining public confidence in the institution.
The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) recently said it had opened an investigation paper following a report lodged on an unexplained sum of more than RM1 million in the bank account of Court of Appeal judge Nazlan Mohd Ghazali, who convicted former prime minister Najib Razak in his RM42 million SRC International case.
However, the anti-corruption agency did not say whether a full investigation would follow.
Fugitive blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin, who published an article about the investigation, also linked the money to Low Taek Jho, or Jho Low, the businessman said to be the mastermind behind the 1MDB scandal.
Nazlan has since lodged a police report over the allegations, saying they were “false, baseless and malicious” and aimed at undermining his credibility as a judge.
In 2007, 2,000 Bar members led by Ambiga walked from the Palace of Justice, Putrajaya, to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to urge the Abdullah Ahmad Badawi government to set up a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) into a judge-fixing scandal.
An RCI was subsequently set up by the government, and it held that action be taken against former lawyer VK Lingam, then chief justice Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim, former chief justice Eusoff Chin, tycoon Vincent Tan, former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and former minister Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor.
It was revealed in the inquiry that Lingam was engaged in a telephone conversation with Fairuz in 2001 to appoint superior court judges who would be aligned to the establishment.