Law & Paneir: Realisation of Our Rights

  The Melaka High Court has made an important and, in my view, entirely correct decision in refusing to immediately record a proposed RM1.7 million settlement involving a permanently disabled road accident victim. Judicial Commissioner K Raja Segaran’s decision is significant because it demonstrates that a court is not merely a passive institution for rubber-stamping agreements reached between litigants and their lawyers. According to Free Malaysia Today’s report, the accident victim, Sultan Nur Mohamad, suffered severe traumatic brain injuries and permanent disabilities following a motorcycle collision on March 2, 2024. He subsequently pursued his claim through his wife, Sharifah Nizamuddin, as his litigation representative. The Sessions Court had found the motorcycle rider wholly liable and the registered owner vicariously liable, awarding Sultan RM1.87 million in damages, interest and costs. While an appeal was pending, the parties agreed to settle for RM1.7 million, togethe...

  The rapid rise of the Houthi movement in Yemen is no longer simply a Middle Eastern security problem. Its growing ability to combine territorial control, missiles, drones, maritime pressure and political messaging demonstrates how a non-state armed movement can transform itself into a strategic actor capable of challenging states and disrupting international commerce. For Southeast Asia, the more worrying question is not whether the Houthis will directly establish themselves in the region, but whether their success could inspire other terrorist organisations, extremist networks and sleeper cells to emulate their methods. Recent developments in Yemen underline the scale of the problem. The Houthis have claimed control of the strategically important port of Mocha and advanced towards the Bab al-Mandab Strait, one of the world's critical maritime chokepoints. Their advances have brought them closer to controlling territory overlooking the Red Sea shipping route. The renewed fi...

  The departure of Rafizi Ramli, Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad and Wong Chen from PKR is more than an internal party dispute. Taken together, their exits raise a larger question about Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s political future: could the erosion of reformist figures from his own political camp become one of the factors that ultimately undermines Pakatan Harapan (PH) at the 16th General Election? The answer is not necessarily that Anwar will lose GE16 because three prominent politicians have left. Malaysian elections are rarely determined by personalities alone. But the departures expose a potentially more serious problem — the weakening of the reformist political constituency that helped bring Anwar to power. Rafizi and Nik Nazmi announced their departure from PKR and vacated their parliamentary seats in May 2026, subsequently becoming associated with Parti Bersama Malaysia. Wong Chen followed by leaving PKR and vacating the Subang parliamentary seat in August, ending nearly two d...

  A quarter of a century following the September 11 attacks, a question that warrants fresh consideration in Malaysia and Southeast Asia is whether terrorism has genuinely decreased, or if it has merely evolved into a different manifestation. The answer is uncomfortable. Terrorism has not disappeared. It has evolved. The attacks of Sept 11, 2001, transformed international security. Al-Qaeda demonstrated how a relatively small non-state organisation could exploit globalisation, international travel, communications and technological vulnerabilities to produce strategic consequences far beyond its physical strength. Two and a half decades later, the threat has become more fragmented, decentralised and technologically adaptive. The rise of Yemen's Houthi movement illustrates this transformation. The Houthis are not Al-Qaeda or Islamic State (IS), and their ideology and political objectives are different. Yet their evolution demonstrates how a non-state armed movement can exploi...

Twenty-five years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it is tempting to regard Al-Qaeda as a diminished remnant of a different era. Osama bin Laden is dead, the organisation’s original leadership has been severely disrupted, and the Afghanistan sanctuary that once provided the environment for planning and training has been transformed. Nevertheless, such assumptions risk overlooking the most important lesson of 9/11: terrorism does not disappear simply because its original organisation is weakened. It adapts, fragments and finds new pathways into societies. The threat facing Malaysia today is therefore not a return to the Al-Qaeda of 2001, but the emergence of a more dispersed and technologically enabled extremist ecosystem that can operate without a conventional command structure. The importance of 9/11 should consequently be reconsidered not merely as a historical event, but as a strategic turning point. The attacks demonstrated how a relatively small terrorist netw...

  The latest revelations about China-linked online influence operations should be treated as more than another episode in the long-running contest over information. They point to a fundamental transformation in cognitive warfare: artificial intelligence is making it cheaper, faster and easier for states and their proxies to manufacture the appearance of public opinion. The danger is not simply that artificial intelligence can create false information. The more consequential development is its ability to combine falsehoods with genuine grievances, authentic news, realistic images and apparently independent voices. This makes manipulation considerably harder to distinguish from legitimate democratic debate. Recent investigations provide a warning. OpenAI reported in June 2026 that it disrupted China-linked clusters using ChatGPT to generate social-media comments and images designed to influence American debates over data centres, AI policy and tariffs. One operation created mater...