On the eve of the Malaysia Day national holiday in September 2011, Najib Abdul Razak, president of the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and Prime Minister of Malaysia, announced the next phase of the Government Transformation Programme (GTP, Program Transformasi Kerajaan) designed to convert Malaysia into a ‘more open and dynamic democracy … at par with other democratic systems in the world’. To that end, he undertook to make the legal and policy changes necessary for Malaysia to become ‘a functional and inclusive democracy where public peace and prosperity is preserved in accordance with the supremacy of the constitution, rule of law and respect for basic human rights and individual rights (Najib, 2011). Prime Minister Najib specifically promised to terminate the overlapping states of emergency that had been in place for nearly five decades, and to end detention without trial by repealing the Internal Security Act 1960 (ISA); he was notably less precise concerning what other laws might be removed or revised. Indeed, in the aftermath of the announcement, Najib conceded that he had only sketched the ‘basic principle’ and that ‘we need to look at the details’ (Malaysiakini, 27 September 2011). Hints of these new ‘details’ were drip-fed to a feverish mass media over the following weeks and months. Inevitably, expectations were raised and then shockingly dashed as it became apparent that the new laws, and the way they were interpreted and implemented, amounted not to a transformation from a species of semi-authoritarianism to ‘a functional and inclusive democracy’, but rather to fresh ways to achieve the same authoritarian ends.

This chapter will describe and critique some key features of the course of legal change in the five years between the launch of a purported law reform package in September 2011 and the end of 2016. In doing so, it is conceded that it is understandable for progressive Malaysians to express shock and dismay at the UMNO regime's apparent hypocrisy, and tempting to explain the resurgence of authoritarian law-making and law enforcement since the formal end of the emergency as UMNO's response to both its electoral misfortunes in the 2013 general election and the politically destabilising consequences of the massive 1MDB financial scandal enveloping Prime Minister Najib since mid-2015 (see Steiner's chapter in this volume).