Kota Kinabalu, Friday, 22 April 2022
The Sabah Attorney General is wrong to brush aside the excellent proposal by the Sabah Law Society President to the Sabah AG Chambers to set up a repository of documents and historical facts about the Philippines/Sulu claim to Sabah.
In the explanation, the Sabah AG had merely stated that the Philippines/Sulu claim to Sabah is being handled by the Federal government.
But, as lawyers should know, the strength of a case depends on the facts backed by evidence such as written documents. I would like to remind our learned Sabah AG that the ICJ (International Court of Justice) award of Pulau Ligitan and Pulau Sipadan to Malaysia (against Indonesia in 2002) was because of a historical document issued by the British-era authorities in North Borneo (Sabah) to collect turtle eggs at Sipadan island. It is plain and obvious that such a crucial document has originated from Sabah’s historical records. The Federal AG Chambers had relied on that turtle egg and documents that resided in Sabah.
Similarly, in this stubborn issue of the Sulu claim to Sabah, there are many documents that not only prove that Sulu never owned Sabah but that sovereignty had passed from Brunei to (eventually) the British and Malaysia without Sulu ever having any rights or ownership of North Borneo.
Key documents are still available in Brunei and other countries.
What Sabah needs, as rightly pointed out by the Sabah Law Society, is our (Sabah) own repository. This need (of Sabah’s own depository) was exemplified when the former Federal AG revealed at a webinar that he was not aware of certain historical documents when the Federal AG Chambers was handling the Sulu arbitration case at Spain in 2019.
Believe me, the Federal authorities will be knocking on the doors of the Sabah AG Chambers. They require the assistance of the Sabah government to provide much of the historical documents. It would be a gross embarrassment to Sabah when we (our own Sabah AG Chambers) are in the dark about the true and correct history of Sabah (North Borneo).
I can say this with confidence because the Sabah Government had similarly provided extensive information to the Federal government in the case of Ligitan/Sipadan in the 1990s. That was one of the reasons that Malaysia won the case at ICJ in 2002.
I urge the Sabah AG Chambers to rethink the need for a depository of documents on the Philippines/Sulu claim to Sabah.
I am confident that the SLS and relevant researchers and academics can assist the Sabah Government in setting up the depository.
Datuk Yong Teck Lee
Ex-Chief Minister