The fearmongering Dewan debates against international treaties

One Member confided that in all his years in the Dewan Rakyat, what he saw developing was a heightened level of communal politics never before seen. The unpleasantness infected even the interjections in the course of the debates.

The irony was not lost on me on 19 November 2018 when in the course of his reply to Members’ questions raised during the budget debate on the Prime Minister’s Department’s allocation, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of National Unity, Senator Waytha Moorty Ponnusamy, was relentlessly shouted down to such an extent that the Members who were attacking him verbally were not at all interested to listen to his points of reply.

The matter that triggered the outburst was Malaysia’s proposed ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

This was an otherwise respected treaty to outlaw racial discrimination defined by Article 1 of the treaty as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life”, with exclusions provided within it.

Never mind that one such exclusion is “positive discrimination”, the proposed move was perceived by the Opposition MPs as a threat to the special position of the Malays...