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How to Transform Malaysia’s Regime 255

minority rights (e.g., Economist 2018; Ahmad Fauzi and Che Hamdan, this
volume). Regardless, even moderate changes to legislation will help to clear
the air, suggesting a less punitive approach to governance and a receptivity
to critique—and in the short term, they could serve to exculpate a number
of prominent gures from Pakatan parties and civil society facing cases or
convictions for their prior statements or actions.

Institutions
Legal reforms overlap with institutional ones. Recognising the complexity and
breadth of institutional reform possible, the unelected Council of Eminent
Persons, which the incoming Pakatan government near-immediately named
as advisors, recommended formation of an Institutional Reforms Committee
(IRC). Promptly constituted, the latter committee brought together two retired
judges, the National Human Rights Society president (also the former head of
Bersih), an emeritus professor of constitutional law, and the president of the
National Patriots Association of Veterans (Shazwan 2018). In mere months, the
IRC drafted a comprehensive and voluminous policy agenda—unfortunately
not released to the public, but its recommendations disseminated amongst
relevant government ministries and agencies, and embodied in initiatives such
as an encompassing National Anti-corruption Plan launched in January 2019
(Weiss 2019a: 56–7). e most germane institutional changes for democratic
consolidation are likely those related to (re-)placing checks and balances
and to recalibrating the federal system, although the full range extends from
renovating the bureaucracy to depoliticizing university administration.
Over years of single-party-dominant, electoral-authoritarian governance,
checks and balances had weakened signi cantly. Power had become increasingly
centralized under the executive. Especially important: constitutional
amendments under Mahathir in the late 1980s had whittled away independent
judicial authority (Shah 2018). Changes such as a Judicial Appointments
Commission sketched in 2009 legislation helped little: the Commission not
only over-represents senior judges, but it cannot hold the prime minister, who
has nal say, to its recommendations (Shad 2018b). Other guidelines are also
problematic, such as the provision by which the chief justice may advise the
king to appoint an ‘additional judge’—with insecure tenure and without a
mandatory retirement age—entailing ‘conversion of the judicial leadership
into one of political patronage’ (Shad 2018b).
Parliament had likewise evolved in such a way as to limit both its power
of executive oversight and scope of debate on and participation in legislation.

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