AN IMAGINED HISTORY: DECONSTRUCTING THE BATU PUTEH JUDGMENT

Dato' Dr Shaharil Talib will be presenting a talk entitled An Imagined History: Reconstructing the Batu Puteh Judgment for the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.

The details of the talk are as follows:

Date: Saturday 20 June 2009
Time: 6.30 pm
Venue: Badan Warisan Malaysia premises, 2 Jalan Stonor, 50450 Kuala Lumpur

For bookings please contact:
E: mbras@tm.net.my
T: 03 2283 5345
More details can be found at the MBRAS website.


Abstract

The decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – by twelve votes to four – on 23 May 2008 to award the small rock island of Pulau Batu Puteh/Pedra Branca to Singapore brought to an end a protracted international dispute. The heart of the Court’s judgment was that although the island had originally been under the sovereignty of the Johor Sultanate, the United Kingdom and Singapore had carried out various acts of sovereignty in respect of the island. The failure of Malaya/Malaysia to respond to these acts, especially in the period after 1953, and other actions which demonstrated their acknowledgment of Singapore's sovereignty over the island, meant that Singapore had gained sovereignty over Pedra Branca. In January 2009, in the best academic tradition Singapore quickly published an authorised version of this episode under the title Pedra Branca: The Road To The World Court, written by two of the leading legal minds behind Singapore’s case, Professors S. Jayakumar and Tommy Koh.

This lecture follows the same academic tradition by subjecting both the Court’s judgment and Jayakumar and Koh’s account to critical review. It does so by deconstructing the judgment. The judgment was predicated on an interpretation of the empirical evidence presented before the Court by the two parties. As Judge Ad Hoc Dugard noted, the Court was “compelled to choose between competing facts and to attach more weight to some facts than to others. This is the nature of fact finding in the judicial process”.

Picking up on the disquiet expressed by Dugard and others, this lecture suggests that any set of evidence or facts must be evaluated in relation to the context in which they was produced; the completeness of the data; and the thoroughness as an historical record. In light of this, it is argued that the evidence adduced by Singapore was deeply flawed by its selectivity and failure to disclose. This led in turn to interpretative distortion. Indeed, Dugard goes so far as to say that the Court was “unduly influenced by its interpretation” of certain evidence while other facts were virtually ignored. This was most clear in the period when Singapore was no longer the Settlement of Singapore as part of the Colony of the Straits Settlements (1867-1946) but rather the Colony of Singapore (1946-1959), the State of Singapore (1959-1963) and the Republic of Singapore (1965-onwards). As a result, we argue that the Court’s judgment was based on an imaginary record of evidence, one that was extremely partial in both senses of the term: the evidence was interpreted selectively; and the facts on the ground were weighed in a biased way.

In the final analysis, history was distorted and compromised. It is incumbent on historians to put that record straight. As the great historian Fernand Braudel reminds us, “everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that … we may respect the unit of history”. The definitive story of Pulau Batu Puteh is still to be written in this spirit.

****

All are welcome.