Lim Chee Wee, the president of the Malaysian Bar recently called for the coroner’s court to allow the coroner to supervise death investigations. This is the type of system that is being practiced in developed countries like Singapore and New Zealand where Malaysia should look at modelling one with theirs.
Lim said that the idea of a new Coroner’s Court was well received by the De Facto Law Minister, Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz who is also the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office when it was proposed to him.
At the moment, the coroner only receives the report from the investigations from the police who will send after they have completed their investigations. Where this is concerned, the death inquiry is a quasi-judicial proceeding and that is why the coroner or the magistrate is not involved in supervision of overseeing the investigations.
The call came in light of a recent case where High Court judge Justice Kamardin Hashim concluded after the inquest into the death of R Gunasegaran with an open verdict of the coroner. He made the conclusions in his judicial review where Gunasegaran died while in police custody.
A better model would be one where the Coroners Act is administered by the coroner where it would encompass major responsibilities like presiding over inquiries, making findings, ensuring that all the relevant and related evidence are gathered and very importantly, supervising the investigations.
If that is implemented, it means that the coroner will be the one issuing instructions to the police on how to conduct the investigations where the actual actions are still carried out by the police. Lim also suggested that among the directions that the coroner could issue could include calling for a different police station to investigate deaths of detainees under custody. It could also call for the setting up of a special police team to investigate the case.
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