Treat sedition suspects as guilty until proven innocent, Umno MP says

The Malay Mail Online reports as follows-

Individuals charged under the Sedition Act 1948 must be made to prove their own innocence, an Umno lawmaker said today when calling for the colonial-era law be made stricter. 

In making his suggestion to shift the burden of proof, Tanjong Karang MP Datuk Seri Noh Omar said the nation’s peace was of greater importance than an individual’s civil liberties and legal rights.

“The burden of proof should be on the person who’s charged,” Noh Omar said during the debate of Budget 2015 in Parliament here today.

I was planning to write that the report above, if accurate, really and seriously points to the dire need for legislators to be better schooled in the type of constitutional and legal framework that Malaysia has adopted.

Unfortunately, I have to negate that entire line of thought because online biodata shows that Noh Omar actually read law at Thames Valley University which is now known as the University of West London. He actually has a law degree, for goodness sake.

I'm now going to crawl into a cave to perform omphaloskepsis...

picture sourced here