Law & Paneir

Recently, Tun Dr Mahathir had proposed to government to bring back Internal Security Act (ISA) and Inspector General of Police had also suggested that he wanted the government to consider ISA to be implemented again which was abolished almost two years ago to tackle various security problems in our country now. The rising of crime and terrorist attacks in Sabah probably had driven both of them to have this suggestion. In my opinion, rather than brings back the ISA, the government should enact new security laws which have all the necessary elements that missing on the current legislation to curb such problems. For that reasons the government can look into various security legislation from United Kingdom and Australia to draft new security legislation rather than bring a legislation which already was repealed. There are surveys in UK had stated that the public increasingly willing to give up theirs civil liberties in the name of counter-terrorism. In Terrorism Act 2000 ,...

The Terrorism Act 2000 was designed as a consolidating provision, drawing together previous anti-terror laws into a single code that would not require renewal or re-enactment (save for one part that related to Northern Ireland). Since the passage of that Act, the deadly consequences of terrorism have been dramatically highlighted in the West by the attacks of September 11, the Madrid bombings, the 7/7 bombings in London and a host of failed domestic and international plots. These incidents appear to have acted as a catalyst for further terrorism legislation.  Though there have been “only” 59 terrorism-related deaths in Great Britain since 2001, the threat should not be underestimated; the authorities have been able to prevent a series of plots, and atrocities have been avoided through the incompetence of the terrorists themselves. The 2000 Act has been heavily amended by subsequent Acts. While this is a common legislative practice, it can make parts of the Act difficult t...

The US is less safe against a ubiquitous threat from global terrorism today than it was even one or two years ago, according to those who chair Congress’s intelligence committees. Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads the Senate panel, and Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the committee in the House, strongly concurred on this question during a television interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” program last Sunday. CNN’s Candy Crowley asked Feinstein, “Are we safer now than we were a year ago, two years ago?” Feinstein responded: “I don’t think so. I think terror is up worldwide, the statistics indicate that, the fatalities are way up.” She added that there were “more groups than ever and there’s huge malevolence out there.” Rogers enthusiastically concurred: “Oh, I absolutely agree that we’re not safer today for the same reasons.” With the US now spending twice as much on its intelligence apparatus as it did in 2001—we now know, than...

Al Qaeda rose and fell between 1989 and 2011. Ten years after it conducted its most lethal operation in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, it had mutated into a movement that no longer resembled what it started as. From a hierarchical and centralised group, led by the bicephalous leadership of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al Dhawahiri, it had become a regionalised and decentralised organisation with several competing leaders following the death of Bin Laden in May 2011. The impact of Al Qaeda on global politics is then a long standing affair. Its inception reaches back decades to the contemporary emergence and transformation of a non-state armed group which has sought to create unprecedented regional and international dynamics anchored in a privatised usage of force for a political purpose. Beyond solely triggering domestic or foreign crises, this organisation has aimed, in particular, to adapt, achieve and prosper open-endedly as it pursued such novel strate...

WHEN Osama bin Laden's forehead was blasted open by elite US soldiers nearly three years ago, many hoped it would also signal the death of al-Qaeda. But his terror group is widely considered to be on the rise again.The jihadist organisation has once again made itself known through bloodshed, just as al-Qaeda death squads made the world pay attention after they ploughed airliners into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001.Masked gunmen captured two major Iraqi cities from authorities last week. A suicide bombing caused devastation in Beirut - killing at least 23. And the carnage continues in Syria, most of it unreported.Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility of each of these attacks."There has been a resurgence in al-Qaeda related violence," said Clive Williams, a former Australian intelligence officer and a visiting national security professor at the Australian National University. OK, but who are these people?   The terror group af...

Summary In its 40 years of existence, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has played well above its collective weight in world politics, though its reputation for effective diplomacy was seriously tarnished by an inability to resolve the region?s 1997- 98 financial crisis and other political challenges in the 1990s, including East Timor?s secession from Indonesia, annual forest fire haze from Indonesian Borneo that creates a regional public health hazard, and the 1997 Cambodian coup that overturned an ASEAN-endorsed election. The primary explanation for ASEAN?s political weakness has been its attachment to the principle of noninterference in its members? domestic affairs. Much of ASEAN?s political effort in the early 21st century is devoted to overcoming this weakness. The primary impetuses for ASEAN moving beyond sovereignty protection are transnational challenges, particularly terrorism, the exploitation of ocean resources, and maritime security, al...

The militant Islamic movement Boko Haram, which has its roots in Nigeria, poses a potential danger to Nigeria's neighbours should its influence spread beyond the country's borders. This potential threat should be evaluated and managed as Nigeria and the international community attempt to address the challenge posed by Boko Haram. The risks presented by the militant group are amplified primarily through the prevalence of porous borders in the West African sub-region. Countries like Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Niger are all potential targets due to their proximity to Nigeria, their demographics and their socio-economic realities. At greatest risk are Cameroon and Niger, which share considerably vast borders with Nigeria. Nigeria's borders with Benin and Chad are fairly short - 773km and 87km long respectively. In comparison, Nigeria's borders with Niger and Cameroon span 1 497km and 1 690km respectively. The porous nature of these borders heightens the pot...

In the hours following the collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers on September 11, 2001, the United States applied a tourniquet to the transportation arteries that feed its national economy. The first campaign in the war to protect the U.S. homeland was to impose an embargo — on its own economy. Freezing its transport networks first and asking questions later was clearly appropriate. Now comes the hard part. While domestic policing must be emphasized, considerable threat also exists in cross-border traffic. Chemical and biological weapons can be more easily loaded on a boat, in a truck, or within a maritime container than on a missile. Front-line agencies like the U.S. Customs Service, Coast Guard, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Department of Agriculture, and Border Patrol are being called upon to respond in ways for which they have neither the staff nor the training. Last year, 489 million people, 127 million cars, 11.6 million maritime contain...

Long before September 11, 2001 strategists recognized that prevention was a priority among concepts of national security. Military strategy had generally accepted “forward deployment” of assets and influence as core tactics to deter opponents from taking aggressive actions and quickly interrupting them once they began. Law enforcement strategy has developed more slowly in adopting a preventive approach. Still, at least by the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the presidential directives of both Republican and Democratic administrations had ordered law enforcement agencies to deploy resources abroad to intercept and disrupt threats as far from the U.S. border as feasible. Under those directives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), among other domestic law enforcement agencies, initiated overseas operations and deployments. The events of 9/11 pushed prevention to new promine...