A legal study of the criminal trial process under the adversarial system in Malaysia / Nurliyana Zainudin…[et al.]

This research was conducted to examine the weaknesses in the criminal trial process under the adversarial system in Malaysia. In particular, the failure to provide for a fair and speedy trial in the criminal trial has been discovered throughout the research. The weakness of the criminal trial process as mentioned above is insistence upon procedure and technical error, the judge inactive role either during pre-trial or trial process, lacking the competent judge in the judiciary, the practice of the general court and also the court's conventional system which mostly based on the manual system and involving papers and handwriting. The reformats had been made to the legislative and judicial practices, specifically the amendments to Criminal Procedure Code in 2006 and 2010 as well as the establishment of a 'special court' and new management system called E-court. Based on the present weaknesses of the criminal trial process under the adversarial systet:Jl in Malaysia, the study evaluates the effectiveness and efficacy of the changes introduced to the criminal trial process. It is the conclusion of this research that there are some advantages of the reforms to the criminal trial process. However, there are also disadvantages and limitation of the reformed criminal trial process. This is due to the lacking in the enforcement and implementation of the reforms. Even though there are still many issues pertaining to the efficiency of the criminal trial process, the reform to the system is applauded and should be continued to strive for betterment of the system.