Roger Chin criticised the dearth of Sabahan judges in the Court of Appeal and the Federal Court while speaking at a Borneo States symposium recently, the Daily Express reported.

“We have Datuk Ravi (Justice Ravinthran Paramaguru), who has been in Sabah for a very long time and is married to a Sabahan. But in reality, there are zero Sabah judges,” he was quoted as saying.

“Obviously, this is not very fair,” he said, as there are bound to be cases that concern Sabah’s interests.

Chin said one third of the 32 Court of Appeal judges should be from Sabah and Sarawak, equally split between the two states, in the spirit of the Malaysia Agreement 1963.

“This is important because these judges will decide how the relevant laws are interpreted and applied,” he said.

Chin noted that the Intergovernmental Committee report in 1962 on the formation of Malaysia had recommended that appeal cases involving the rights of Sabah and Sarawak be heard by a Federal Court panel with at least one judge from the two states.

However, this provision had not always been honoured, he said. “If we do not know what our rights are, they will be diluted,” he added.

He said the MA63 was only made possible by the promises made to woo Sabah and Sarawak into being part of the Malaysian federation.

“We all know that we make a lot of promises when we are dating. When you marry, those promises must be kept.

“(These promises) were to ensure that Sabah and Sarawak keep their own identity as separate regions in the formation of Malaysia, with their own rights, to a certain degree,” he said.