Porkies!
To the Right Honourable Mr. John Major PC Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
LONDON SW1
Sir:
This is a most urgent plea that you should require various departments and officials of your Government to apply in my case the principles of open government of which you have often spoken. On numerous occasions during the six and a half years which I have spent on remand in British prisons, ministers and officials have declined to disclose documents which would have materially assisted my struggle for liberty.
Mr. Prime Minister, please do consider my case and in doing so please bear in mind that this is a matter which
DOES NOT IN ANY WAY INVOLVE NATIONAL SECURITY, BUT DOES CONCERN LIBERTY OF THE PERSON
In resisting efforts to extradite me to Hong Kong,
to Hong Kong, I have made eight applications for habeas corpus. This succession of applications has been necessary solely because all the information and knowledge which I now have were not available to me at any previous stage. Most significantly, it was not available to me at the time of the committal proceedings in 1986, or at the time of my first application for habeas corpus. If it had been available, I and my legal advisers are sure that the impact of it, and hence the result, would have been very different.
A summary of the occasions on which disclosure has been refused on the ground of public interest immunity is enclosed (Attachment "A").
Surely, if your statements about open government are to mean anything, these documents should have been released to my legal advisers. After all, my liberty is at stake, and there are
no
the
issues of national security involved. True, some of the Foreign Office telegrams reveal a political dimension to the case, and show that officials have made certain arrangements to conceal the responsibility of certain high officers of the Malaysian Government (currently in opposition to the Government of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad) in transactions for which I have been chosen as
as a scapegoat: but surely it would only be fair that the protection of these high officers for "public interest" reasons should not be used as an excuse to conceal these documents from the courts' consideration and hence to deprive me of my liberty? I should be grateful if you would re-examine the
the appropriateness of all the public interest immunity certificates which have been issued in my case and, if you think it right, invite the Ministers who have signed those certificates to change their decision.
their decision. I need those documents to help to demonstrate my innocence.
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