HUMAN rights organisations in Malaysia must realise that their reports on alleged violations and shortcomings in the country can only be helpful and meaningful if they liaise with the authorities or the government — not by mere publications nor by liaising with foreign bodies.
The non-governmental organisations community must recognise that efforts to identify and spotlight alleged flaws and failures in the area of human rights here will only be used by Western organisations and governments to malign our country.
And, to justify coercive external pressure against our institutions to bring them into compliance with values and standards which they define and dictate, which may not adhere to our cultural norms and values.
International human rights bodies and Western governments typically use human rights complaints of local organisations purely for propagandistic purposes and not for the genuine advancement of human rights.
The recent report on human rights in Malaysia by the US State Department heavily relied upon complaints raised by local NGOs, treating those complaints as patently factual and unbiased.
We, in Malaysia, know that it is the bread and butter of such NGOs to overstate and oversimplify their grievances as a deliberate tactic to raise public awareness and concerns and to bend the ear of the government.
For instance, when they report incidents of arrests and investigations involving the Sedition Act or the Communications and Multimedia Act, they are not actually interested in whether those arrests were justified nor whether the investigations would result in cases being dropped.
They are primarily interested in highlighting instances that can be interpreted as a violation of human or civil rights to emphasise the importance of these rights being respected.
To say nothing of the fact that any human rights organisation must, by necessity, discover and publicise alleged violations to justify their continued funding.
With the exception of issues like deaths in police custody and grievances involving the police and prison conditions, human rights reports of local NGOs do not hold up under scrutiny.
Investigations of alleged crimes, sedition or unlawful gatherings are precisely what is expected of law enforcement — these are not human rights violations but maintenance of public order and safety in accordance with due process.
Read objectively, the reports of these NGOs actually testify to the integrity of the system in Malaysia and evidence of our respect for human rights.
The recent statement by Article 19, the Centre for Independent Journalism, CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation and Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram) at the Item 4 General Debate 0t the 49th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, for instance, highlighted the investigation of Fahmi Reza on charges of sedition but failed to mention that the case was dismissed by the police.
We can only assume that the NGOs agreed with this decision but acknowledging it would not have served their objectives.
Domestically, there is no problem with this. It is their role to only emphasise what they deem as abuse or misconduct by the authorities. It is not their role to admit when rights are protected.
However, when we fail to credit the government and law enforcers with fair and just execution of their duties, particularly in our statements to those outside Malaysia, we are misrepresenting our country, state and society to our own detriment.
While NGOs are right to express concern over deaths in police custody, they are wrong not to acknowledge the steps taken by the government to prevent such incidences, such as the Death in Custody Investigations Unit set up in December last year.
By voicing their concerns to international bodies, without mentioning the government's steps to address those concerns, they inadvertently provide outsiders the propagandistic ammunition to smear the reputation of Malaysia and legitimise external interference in our affairs.
No one is more qualified to define for our society what our standards are, what our understanding of human rights should be or what improvements need to be made in our system than the people themselves and our representatives in the government.
Reporting our grievances, legitimate or otherwise, to outside institutions amounts to an invitation for them to exert pressure on our country to comply with their Western-centric recommendations and remedies which, unavoidably, undermines our sovereignty and independence.
Ultimately, this will lead to deterioration of our social cohesion and stability because Western solutions cannot be applied to our problems.
The author is founder and chairman of Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy
