DATUK Seri Azalina Othman Said has issued a challenge to the self-proclaimed heirs of the late Sulu Sultan to take their claim of sovereignty over Sabah to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) if they have proof.
The Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Law and Institutional Reform) also said that the matter was not a commercial issue but a sovereignty-related one.
“Why are you (Sulu claimants) not going to the ICJ? If you are questioning a territorial matter it would not be on a commercial arbitration platform,” she was reported as saying at the International Arbitration Colloquium 2023 in Kuala Lumpur today (May 9).
“Challenge us in the ICJ if you claim that you have entitlement, proof, mapping and documents. Challenge us that way and we will fight you until the end.”
Azalina further noted that the Sulu claimants have used “guerrilla tactics” to abuse the arbitration process, adding that Malaysia will not sit idly by or remain silent on the matter.
As such, the government is ready to continue what must be done to defend the nation’s sovereignty no matter the cost in pursuing legal action, she stressed.
Azalina, who is also the Pengerang MP, went on to acknowledge that there will be no end to the Sulu sultan’s descendants’ claims so long as there was “a sun and moon”.
She said Malaysia should look into implementing a State Immunity Act, much like the act in Singapore, as part of a strategy to prepare the nation in the event of future claims similar to that of the Sulu heirs.
State immunity prohibits the courts of one state from adjudicating on the domestic acts of another state as well as prohibiting the courts of one state from asserting jurisdiction or permitting enforcement against another sovereign state or its property.
To recap, the legal dispute between the Malaysian government and the eight claimants, the purported “heirs” of the late Sulu Sultan Jamalul Kiram II, erupted in end-January 2018 in Madrid.
The dispute is predicated on an 1878 agreement between Sultan Mohamet Jamal Al Alam (the then-sultan of Sulu) and Baron de Overbeck and Alfred Dent, which granted perpetual sovereign rights over what is part of a chunk of Sabah today, in return for an annual token payment of RM5,300, which Malaysia has been paying since 1878.
But the payments were stopped in 2013 after the self-declared “Sulu Sultan” launched an armed intrusion into Lahad Datu, Sabah. – May 9, 2023
Main pic credit: Bernama
