The 1975 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service

BIOGRAPHY of Mohamed Suffian Bin Hashim

Tun MOHAMED SUFFIAN BlN HASHIM was born on November

12, 1917 in a hamlet on the banks of the Perak River in the
northwestern state of Perak, Malaya. Malaya was at that time, and
until 1957, part of the British empire. His parents, Haji Mohamed
Hashim and Zaharah Ibrahim, lived in a simple rural environment
and his father was a kathi, an official of the Religious Affairs
Department. He attended the Malay-language school in Lenggong
for his first four years, transferring at age 11 to Clifford English
School in Kuala Kangsar. He was always at the head of his class,
received three double promotions, and graduated from high school
in 1933, winning a Queen's Scholarship in 1935, the first Malay to
do so. His English headmaster commented: "SUFFIAN has by his
success brought credit not only to the school and the state, but
also to the whole Malay race. He has provided a striking example
of what a Malay boy can accomplish—without money and without
influence—if he possesses ability and determination."

The scholarship enabled SUFFIAN to attend Gonville and Caius

College at Cambridge University, England, from which he received
a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in 1939 and a Bachelor of Laws in
1940. In January 1941 he was called to the Bar at Middle Temple,
London.

On his way back to Malaya at the end of the year he found himself
stranded in Colombo, Ceylon, as Japanese armies overran his
homeland. The next three years were spent in New Delhi, India, as
newscaster, commentator and eventually head of the Malay Unit of
All India Radio. The last year of the war he was back in London as
Malay sub-editor and language supervisor for the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He believes his work in radio
was excellent training for his future years on the bench; on radio
he had to learn to write and speak clearly, briefly and to the point.

In 1946, while still in England, SUFFIAN was recruited into the

Malayan Civil Service (MCS): "I was the first native officer to be
recruited directly into the MCS though I had been turned down
previously for that service because I was told, despite being a
barrister with two degrees from Cambridge, I had no experience. I
was later, also during the war, turned down for the Legal Service
for the same reason. "

After the war, however, he was accepted as a member of the

MCS, and took a course in public administration given first at
Cambridge University and then at the London School of
Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies at
London University. Classes, designed to prepare him for service
as a district officer, ranged from surveying and field engineering to
accounting and social anthropology. When he finally returned to
Malaya in 1948, however, he was assigned not as a district of
officer but as a circuit magistrate, a lower court judge, to the city of
Malacca. "I had not touched the law for seven years," he noted,
but "thanks to the kind and tactful advice of my clerks and
interpreters I soon acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the art of
dispensing justice." He was the first Malay to be appointed to such
a post.

Besides his excellent university training SUFFIAN brought back

from England to Malaya an English bride, Dora (Bunny) Evelina
Grange. They had met in 1939 and corresponded while he was in
India but they were not married until May 1946.

Becoming a magistrate instead of a district officer was quite a

shock, but not the only one in store for him. At the end of his first
month on the bench—and after he and his wife had exhausted
their savings—he learned that the government had failed to make
arrangements to pay him a salary. This oversight was taken care
of by appointing him concurrently Harbor Master for the port of
Malacca, the only position for which there was a vacancy.

SUFFIAN was officially transferred from the Malayan Civil Service

to the Legal Service on January 1, 1949. During the next four
years he served as Deputy Public Prosecutor in Kuala Lumpur—
where he learned much about the practice of law—and then in
Johore Bahru. In 1954 he was briefly Federal Counsel at Kuala
Lumpur and then became the first Malayan appointed as Legal
Adviser, and later State Secretary, in Pahang, an underdeveloped
state on the east coast.

In Pahang SUFFIAN formed ideas about public administration

which he incorporated years later in the "Suffian Report," the
report of the Special Commission on Salaries for the Civil Service.
The commission, which he chaired, was established to revise
salaries and conditions of service for the 200,000 government
servants. In the report, issued in 1967, SUFFIAN suggested that
the government make greater use of its power to dismiss civil
servants for inefficiency and suspected corruption. He urged more
emphasis be placed on excellence in government service and less
on seniority, noting that since the country is constantly encouraged
"to do better," public servants should take the lead. This should
apply at state as well as federal level.

In 1956 SUFFIAN was assigned as Legal Adviser to the State of

Johore and was appointed by the Conference of Rulers—the
official body of sultans and governors of the various states—to
advise them in drawing up a constitution for the about-to-be
independent nation. His work in helping draft the national
constitution resulted in his being requested in 1959 by the Sultan
of Brunei (an independent Malay state on the island of Borneo) to
help draft a constitution for that country.

The constitution for the Federation of Malaya (which became

Malaysia in 1963 when the states of Sabah, Sarawak, and briefly
Singapore, joined) became the law of the land on August 31, 1957.
It recognizes two levels of government, the federal level, presided
over by a king chosen for a five year term from among nine ruling
sultans, and the state level. Each of today's 13 member states also
has its own constitution and is governed by a sultan or a governor,
depending upon its political past. Both state and federal
governments are served by parliamentary legislatures. The
independent judicial system, however, is unitary. With the
exception of Muslim religious courts, there are no state courts.
Federal courts enforce both federal and state law.

The supreme court of the land is the Federal Court, presided over
by the Lord President of Malaysia. On the second level are the
High Court of Malaya and the High Court of Borneo (Sabah and
Sarawak). These are presided over by Chief Justices who also sit
on the Federal Court. Below these are Sessions and Magistrates'
courts.

The Lord President and the Chief Justices are assisted on the
Federal Court by four other judges appointed to that court. They
hear appeals from the two High Courts, including appeals in
constitutional disputes. The court normally sits in divisions of three
and hears cases on circuit; its usual workload is 18 one-week
sessions. The Lord President has overall responsibility for all the
courts of Malaysia.

The Chief Justices of the two High Courts have specific

responsibility for the lesser courts in their areas. They are assisted
by puisne judges, or Judges of the High Court (18 in Malaya; 5 in
Borneo). The courts do not sit as units, but the individual judges
preside over courts at the various state capitals.

All judges of the Federal and High Courts are appointed by the
king, on the advice of the prime minister, and after consultation
with the Conference of Rulers. In the case of High Court judges,
the sultans or governors of the states for which they are being
considered for assignment are always consulted as a matter of
courtesy and practical politics. Judges must retire at 65, are
entitled to a pension, and cannot be removed from office except by
a panel of five of their peers.
The independence, honesty and impartiality of judges is of
particular importance in Malaysia which is a multiracial society.
The Malays barely equal the total of the two major recent
immigrant groups, the Chinese and the Indians, both of whom are
economically more advanced than the Malays. As SUFFIAN writes
in the Malayan Law Journal, judges must not only be impartial,
they must be seen by the public as impartial. They must watch
their relationships with the executive branch and with federal public
officials in general, he writes, so that they may neither seem to
favor government at the expense of the public, nor to be biased
toward federal rather than state institutions.

Judges must also be willing to take on the extra duty of serving on

commissions where impartiality needs to be guaranteed. SUFFIAN
himself has not only served on the Special Commission on
Salaries, and the Rulers' Constitutional Advisory Committee, but
he has been Co-Chairman of the National Relief Fund Commission
(1969-70) and a number of university commissions.

In 1958 SUFFIAN had been appointed senior Federal Counsel,

"the youngest and the most senior legal officer in the Legal
Service," and in 1959 he became the first Malayan to serve as
Solicitor-General. He served in this position until 1961 when he
was appointed, at the youthful age of 44, a judge of the High Court
of Malaya and assigned to Kuala Lumpur. The following year he
was transferred to the state of Kedah.

During these years, 1958-1968, SUFFIAN was also asked to serve

his country in the international sphere. In 1958 he was sent as the
sole Malayan delegate to the First United Nations Conference on
Law of the Sea. He led the delegation to the second such
conference in 1960 and visited Tokyo that same year to attend the
U.N. Conference on Human Rights. In 1961 he was the Deputy
Leader of the Malayan Delegation to the U.N. Conference in
Vienna on Diplomatic Immunity, and in 1962 he traveled to Rio de
Janeiro to attend a Conference of the International Commission of
Jurists. In 1964 he was appointed, concurrently, Pro-Chancellor of
the University of Malaya.

The Pro-Chancellor of the University of Malaya is responsible for

presiding over the Court and Council of the university and acting in
the absence of the chancellor (the Sultanah of Kedah and a former
Queen of Malaysia), whose role is advisory and ceremonial. Since
the office of chancellor is also largely honorary the pro-chancellor
frequently acts for the chancellor.

SUFFIAN has helped guide the university by his wise counsel,

"shaping it," as one colleague states, "as the finest academic
institution in the country." He has used the occasion of convocation
and other university events to expound his ideas on the role of
higher education in Malaysia. At a 1970 convocation he urged the
University of Malaya and Malaysia's two new universities to
eliminate duplication—without smothering healthy rivalry—and to
try to find some way to lessen their dependence upon government
financing, noting that "there is no true academic freedom without
financial independence." Responding to student unrest, he pointed
out that academic freedom does not set faculty and student above
the law, nor does it give them license "to disrupt harmony and
destroy the nation." He pointed out to students that the University
of Malaya costs more to operate than most states—M$30.6 million
versus M$26.4 million for Negri Sembilan, for example—and that
this cost is borne by the country as a whole. "You owe a debt not
only to the taxpayer whose money has made it possible for the
government to provide schools and universities," he stated. "You
owe it mostly to your humble fellow citizens whose poverty, no
matter what their racial origin, should be your concern to reduce or
eliminate."

To the engineering, economics and science graduates in June

1971 he said that Malaysia needs to turn out enough graduates
"with the expertise relevant to our national requirement," but added
that the "political cost of producing unemployed and unemployable
graduates is more than the political cost of producing too few." The
frustrated can easily turn into "dangerous malcontents;" the
university should bear this in mind.

He also took this opportunity to suggest that government pension

arrangements should be made more flexible so that mobility
between government and private sectors would be possible. "I am
certain that the private sector can profit from the experience of
public servants and government service can profit from the
experience of persons from the private sector," but people are
reluctant to leave the government because they lose their pension
rights, he stated. Some means of carrying pensions over should be
studied.

Moreover he chose to point out at this time, as he has on many

others, that "cooperation between the communities [racial and
religious] is the most valuable instruction which universities can
impart."

At convocations in 1973 SUFFIAN advocated more sub-university

institutions to produce urgently needed skilled manpower at a sub-
professional level. He noted that every engineer the university
graduates requires eight technicians to assist him. He also stated
his belief that universities have probably overreached their
optimum size. A university, he said, should stay small so that
students can have an opportunity to know each other and their
professors. Such institutions will have fewer problems and the
students will experience less frustration. However, he believes that
the University of Malaya should develop a graduate center so that
students will not be forced to go abroad for postgraduate work.

He further commented that any new university should be sited

away from the federal capital (Kuala Lumpur) since universities
serve as a catalyst for progress. They provide jobs and offer not
only educational, but cultural and sports attractions to the
community at large.

As a result of his position and experience as Pro-Chancellor

SUFFIAN in 1968 headed the team of experts to draft the
constitution of the University of Science in Penang, and in 1969
the committee for drafting the constitution for the new Malay-
language university, Universiti Kebangsaan, now moving from
Kuala Lumpur to Bangi. From 1972 to 1974 he chaired the
important and prestigious Higher Education Advisory Council. He
has also been for over 10 years External Examiner in Law for the
University of Singapore.

In 1968 SUFFIAN was appointed to the Federal Court, the

supreme court of Malaysia, and on November 1, 1973 he was
chosen Chief Justice of Malaya, a position in which he had been
acting for several months. As Chief Justice he not only heard
cases and considered the admission of lawyers to the bar, but was
responsible for all lower courts in peninsular Malaysia.

SUFFIAN’s first effort on assuming this new position was to try to

reduce the backlog of cases that existed, especially in the outlying
courts. He firmly believes in the old adage, "justice delayed is
justice denied."

Just two months after his appointment as Chief Justice—January

5, 1974—SUFFIAN was elevated to the highest appointive office in
the land, Lord President of Malaysia, a position he will hold until
his retirement at age 65.

SUFFIAN’s concerns as Lord President are the same as they have

always been: to uphold the law and apply it as justly as humanly
possible. He is a "gradualist and traditionalist" who believes that
although laws need to be changed to keep up with the changing
needs of society, this is not the judge's prerogative. He must
interpret the law as it is. He can always point out to the executive
branch where laws are no longer valid and hope that the
legislature will be persuaded to take action. A judge should be
even-handed, he feels, but if he errs it should be on the side of the
"small people," rather than on the side of the "big people,"
including government.

When interviewed about his feelings on appointment to high office,

SUFFIAN was quoted as saying that those so fortunate "should not
be dazzled by prestige; instead they should be excited by the
opportunities that go with high office, service not only in one's
particular area, but outside it also." Asked about future goals,
SUFFIAN replied that in retirement (in 1982) he would like to "grow
bananas and fruit trees and orchids" and write.

The SUFFIANs, who have no children, have a close personal

relationship and share a mutual interest in their home in Kuala
Lumpur. Bunny Suffian has furnished it with Malayan antiques
which she has been collecting in recent years. SUFF—as he is
known to his wife and friends—has already planted a garden of
coconut and rambutan trees and is busily growing orchids. His
interest in orchids is such that he served on the board of the
Malayan Orchid Society in 1964-65 in spite of the other demands
on his time. He shares his wife's interest in ancient ceramics and
has been President of the West Malaysian Chapter of the
Southeast Asian Ceramic Society for the past two years.

Another interest is literature. He reads on the average a book a

week, a practice he has followed since he left school. "I like books
on history—like biography and autobiography," he remarks,
"because I think we can learn a lot from the experiences of
interesting and successful people." He also reads to improve his
own style of exposition.

Writing is a hobby he continues to cultivate. In 1963 he translated

the Malayan Constitution from English into Malay, and in 1968 and
1970 he published, respectively, The Legal System of Malaysia
and Malaysian Citizenship. In 1972 he published An Introduction to
the Constitution of Malaysia. A fellow writer comments, "Humor,
conciseness and clarity characterize his books and articles on
various aspects of Malaysia's law and administration. He has the
rare gift of making a difficult subject simple and interesting."

His wry, gentle humor not only crops up in his writing but in his
speech. He uses it to hold an audience, to lighten tension in the
court or enliven tedious litigation. One lawyer who has appeared
before him notes, "He is liberal and willing to be persuaded, with a
colossal memory and a processing mechanism like a computer. All
this plus that sense of humor of his—he runs a formidable Bench."

SUFFIAN has received a number of honors from his government,

the most recent of which was to be made Tun (the highest title in
Malaysia) by the king on June 4, 1975. Earlier awards by the king
were the Most Distinguished Order of the Pangkuan Negara (Third
Grade) in 1961 and the Most Distinguished Order of Chivalry
(Second Grade) in 1967. He received the Most Honorable Order of
the Crown of Brunei (Third Class) in 1959 for his help with the
Brunei constitution; and the Meritorious Service Medal in 1963 and
the Most Honorable Order of the Crown of Pahang (Second
Grade) in 1969 from the Sultan of Pahang. He has also been
made an Honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Singapore
and an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Malaya,
both in 1972. A book about him entitled A Man of His Times: Lord
President Tan Sri M. Suffian by J. Victor Morais was published in
1974.

SUFFIAN’s interests have never been parochial and during the

course of years he has given his time to organizations which seek
to broaden Malaysia's contacts with the rest of the world. He was
Chairman for 10 years of the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship
Malaysian Nomination Committee, having visited the United States
two years earlier as an Eisenhower Fellow himself, and has been
President of the Malaysian American Society. He has promoted
Commonwealth interests as both Vice President and President of
the Oxford and Cambridge Society, Vice Patron of the Malaysian-
Sri Lanka Society, and Vice President of the Commonwealth
Magistrates' Association. Since 1972 he has been Patron of the
Malaysian Students Law Society in the United Kingdom and Eire.
And last, but really first, in his younger days he was President of
the Malacca Malays Football Association.

A friend has summed up SUFFIAN well: "A simple man, with little
patience for pretentiousness, SUFFIAN commands the respect
and admiration of all classes in society. As judge, Chief Justice
and Lord President, he has been responsible for institutionalizing
the rule of law and justice. As a citizen, he has devoted himself
without thought of gain or recognition to the furtherance of noble
ideals in higher education and the civil service."

Another has written: "In a plural society like Malaysia,

governmental institutions have to stride the fears and hopes of the
diverse groupings. The positioning of the law in such a multiracial
state is crucial to the successful forging of a nation. It is the
achievement of MOHAMED SUFFIAN BIN HASHIM that from
obscure rural beginnings he rose to become the trusted arbiter, the
Solon-figure in the Malaysian multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-
lingual nation."

August 1975
Manila