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254 Meredith L. Weiss

Laws

e easiest changes to make are those that can be e ected with straightforward
legislative action, particularly in repealing or amending existing laws. It is in
this domain that we see the clearest distinction between BN and Pakatan.
Even here, though, the path forward is not entirely clear—almost immediately,
for instance, Mahathir vacillated on whether he would repeal an unpopular
‘fake news’ law steamrolled through Parliament shortly before the elections
(Naidu 2018). ( e law was, however, repealed at last in October 2019.)
Shortly thereafter, new Defence Minister Mohamad Sabu backtracked on
eliminating a National Security Council law critiqued for granting the prime
minister extraordinary powers (Palansamy 2018). e laws which activists and
politicians have proposed or promised to change are plenty, from restoring
the civil liberties enumerated in Article 10 of the Constitution; to instituting
a national freedom of information act to supplement state-level prototypes
in Penang and Selangor; to rules on party nancing and electioneering. Two
weeks after Pakatan’s win, 20 civil society organisations submitted a joint ‘road
map for reforms’, starting with ‘meaningful consultations with civil society’,
and extending to the repeal of laws limiting freedom of expression, lifting
travel bans and blocks on websites, rati cation of human rights treaties, and
strengthening institutional mechanisms for safeguarding rights, such as more
substantially empowering the National Human Rights Commission (Article
19 et al. 2018). Especially key to improving accountability and expanding civil
liberties is amending or repealing the Communications and Multimedia Act
and Printing Presses and Publications Act, the O cial Secrets Act and Sedition
Act (the latter of which in particular has featured in a host of recent lawsuits
against opposition politicians, activists, and journalists), the Peaceful Assembly
Act (the problematic replacement for the Internal Security Act; Whiting 2011),
and provisions of the penal code that criminalize broad categories of speech
and assembly (Lakhdhir 2015).
Changing these laws is complex in practice; the constitutional and political
hurdles Wong identi es in his chapter as stymieing electoral reform apply across
policy domains. Laws related to religious teaching, proselytization, or praxis,
for instance, may have ‘alienated non-Muslims … constricted the development
of Islamic thought and emboldened religious bureaucracies’ (Shah 2018), but
to challenge them might make Pakatan appear insu ciently solicitous of the
place of Islam in the polity. Particularly with PAS a still-strong rival, and an
UMNO-PAS alliance centred on Malay-Muslim rights seemingly cemented
(as Wong also elaborates), Pakatan is likely to tread carefully around matters
of race and religion, however sincere their promises to respect and reinforce

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