Chief Justice Zaki reveals two judges suspected to be corrupt

KUCHING: Two retired judges were suspected to be corrupt, Chief Justice Tan Sri Zaki Azmi said yesterday.
"God helped me because when I came (into the judiciary), they were gone. No, I didn't dismiss them, they retired," he said at a convention on "Integrity, the Catalyst for Sustainable Development" here.He said he knew the two judges personally.On the judges still serving the judiciary, he said there were "one or two" who were not doing their work."We are going to take the necessary action against them because as I have said, 'You leave and don't stay'."
Zaki said those who are hardworking will be rewarded. He also wanted the judges to write shorter and simpler judgments to reduce the backlog of cases."One judge at the Commercial Court Division wrote 500 judgments within two years. How was it that this judge could, but the others could not?" Zaki spoke at length on corruption and how to improve integrity and efficiency.He said the judiciary was an extremely important branch of the government because the public looked at it as the final bastion. "If they fail in the executive, the ministries and Parliament, they will come to the court."The court must be there to defend the individuals, but if the court itself is corrupt, or inefficient, how could the people rely on the court?" Zaki said the way to beat corruption was to have a good, efficient and fast delivery system. Citing the issuance of passports as an example, he said the weeks it took to process applications made it tempting for those in a hurry to offer bribes. Now it takes only two hours or "one fine morning" for a person to get his passport."There is no need for any corruption to take place. There is no money to be made by a person issuing the passport. So, efficiency is the answer."

On how he improved efficiency in the court administration, Zaki said after he was appointed president of the Court of Appeal last year, the first thing he did was visit the registry."The registry was in a mess with 13 clerks looking after 13 piles of records of appeals. "If you want a record of appeal, it takes time because you have to go to the clerk and the clerk has to go through the bundles of documents. "With the total support of the Court of Appeal staff, they managed to reorganise the records of appeals. So now, the records of appeals at the Court of Appeals are retrievable within two or three minutes, not two or three hours or two or three days."With that, any correspondences received by the Court of Appeal are immediately attended to and should be replied within 24 hours of receiving them because the files are retrieved immediately." He said the move stopped corruption because there was no longer a need to bribe the clerk to look for the file.

Zaki had also introduced a simpler procedure by getting the lawyers to fill a form when requesting for files, instead of writing lengthy letters.When the forms reached him, Zaki said it would only take him two minutes to read them and reach a decision on the request. Zaki said he was proud of his staff for this success at the Court of Appeal. The chief justice said to ensure efficiency, immediate punishment must be meted out against errant staff. "(Once) when I was in court, presiding over a case, I turned my back and no one was there, and they (court orderlies) were chatting outside the room. "The first thing I did afterwards was to call the registrar to issue a show-cause letter to them," he said."The show-cause letter had the desired effects because two days later, all the orderlies of the Court of Appeal behaved themselves."
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