This topic just came up over the CNY holidays while I was thinking to myself out loud (i do that quite a bit). The question I posed was this – if we assume that the judiciary is corrupt to the core, how do we fix it? The answer that I came up with was a rather straightforward one – take a page out of history and reboot the judiciary.
You see, we now have a vehicle for sacking the Chief Justices if necessary. According to my understanding of the decision made on the Perak MB case, since it is spelt out in the Constitution that the Ruler has the right to appoint a MB, it is implied that the Ruler also has the right to sack the MB. Since there are a number of positions in our government that are appointed by the Ruler (such as Chief Justices), it is implied that the Ruler can sack them too.
So, I thought to myself, we now have the vehicle to clean up the mess at the top. However, if we assume that the judiciary is corrupt to the core, this would be futile as their new replacements would just be as corrupt as the people we got rid of. So, the question then became one of cleaning up the entire judiciary from the top down. I finally came to the conclusion that we would need to reboot the judiciary.
We will need to get rid of everyone from the top down. The question then became one of running a judicial system without any judiciary. The answer was pretty obvious – hire new judges who have nothing much to lose. This came off a page from our history books. When our country was first founded, a lot of our top civil servants and judges were imported from overseas because we just did not have all the necessary local expertise at the time. So, we could do the same thing today.
Just import the judges from around the world – people who are not beholden to any of our political leaders – and prop up the judicial system with a bunch of temporary judges. These people will be there for a while, in order to clean up the mess and to bring in a crop of new judges to take over their positions. These temporary judges could be culled from a list of distinguished justices from around the world.
Anyway, that was just a random thought that occurred to me.
Sybreon Ones Nought 