Monthly Archives: November 1999

Canadian Journalist Murray Hiebert on his way to Prison in Kuala Limpur, September 11, 1999

Murray Hiebert spent 30 days in jail for reporting that the son of a prominent Malaysian judge had been kicked off the high school debate team. In this essay, Hiebert recounts his ordeal.

Washington, DC — I’ve become quite an expert on Malaysian tourist spots over the past two years. That’s because a local judge sentenced me to three months in prison for “scandalizing the court” in a magazine article that I wrote in 1997. While my appeal wound its way through the Malaysian legal maze, I was forced to remain within the borders of peninsular Malaysia. My problems began in early 1997 when I wrote an article in the Far Eastern Economic Review, a news weekly published in Hong Kong by Dow Jones & Co, about a mother who was suing the International School of Kuala Lumpur for $2.4 million. She mounted the suit because fellow students had kicked her 17-year-old son off a debating team for alleged cheating. I used this case as an example to demonstrate that Malaysia had become almost as litigious as the United States.

I paid a heavy price for that piece: on October 11, 1999, I finally got my passport back after completing 27 months under “country arrest” and 30 days in prison. (more…)